ROCHELLE RUTHCHILD:  – Mrs. Addelson in her home under the auspices of the Jewish Women’s Archive, Temple Israel Oral History Project in Boston, Massachusetts.  This is Saturday October 18, 1997.

FRANCES ADDELSON:  This is Frances Addelson being interviewed because of my great age and because it is hoped that I will recall some early experiences in the early part of the century.  That may be of interest to the Jewish Women’s Archive.

RR:  This is Rochelle Ruthchild interviewing Frances Addelson.  Frances, would you like to say a little bit about your childhood, who your parents were, where they came from?

FA:  Yes.  First, some of the pictures I remember of my very earliest childhood that people may be interested in is the clothes I wore as a little girl.  I remember wearing long underwear, folding it over my legs, and then putting stockings on top of them.  I always had pictures with wrinkled knees.  The stockings were gartered and connected to a little vest that was called a (steznik?).  I’ve never heard anyone use that word, but it’s ingrained somewhere in my mind.  The (steznik?), which hooked on the garters to the stockings.  Of course, I remember wearing rubbers over shoes.  Also, I remember a runaway horse down Blue Hill Avenue, which frightened me terrifically and left a picture in my memory.  Other things that happened way, way back?  I remember in a department store, there were sort of runways on the ceiling.  When you bought anything, the bill was put into one of these boxes that ran to a central office and then came back with the change and money.  I also remember going with my father to Dudley Street, where there was a General Electric store.  I don’t know what it was called then.  General Electric office.  We would carry worn-out light bulbs and, in return, get free light bulbs to bring back home.  So that must have happened a long, long time ago.  Anyhow, my father came from Moscow.  He came alone, probably with landsleit.  I think he really came alone because he had no relatives in this country except one cousin in Rhode Island.  

RR:  What year was that about?

FA:  He was about eight.  He must have been seventeen or eighteen.  He came about 1885 or ’90.  I can’t figure it out very well right now.  He came to New York.  My mother came with a sister at the age of thirteen.  She and this sister came to be with their older sister, who had come with landsleit from a small town in the Rusia, Poland area.

RR:  Do you know the name of the town?

FA:  I think it was Gomel, but I’m not sure.  It was a very small, poor area.  It probably was not in the big city.  The older sister was a very enterprising person.  Although she was living in New York and working in one of the waste factories, she soon realized that she had potential.  She was very clever in sewing.  She took her two sisters and moved to the Roxbury section on Blue Hill Avenue.  And there, she set up a ladies’ dressmaking set up in her home and enlarged it and would hire some of these girls who came from her area in Europe and would sort of mother them as she did my mother and would give them work in her home.  She made some beautiful dresses custom-made for wealthy women.  She was very successful in that business.

RR:  Could you say when that was around?  Was that around the turn of the century around 1900, or was it earlier?

FA:  My mother was married in, oh dear.  Turn it off for a minute.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  Yes, it does.  Frances is showing me her family history. Frances, did you put this together yourself?

FA:  Yes.  I wrote this section.

RR:  It says that her mother, Esther, was married – what’s her maiden name?

FA:  Cohen.

RR:  Esther Cohen was born in 1860.

FA:  Oh, no.  No, no.  That can’t be right.  I know.  No, she couldn’t have been born in 1860.  Her father was born in 1860.

RR:  Oh, okay.  She came to the United States around 1905-1906.  It doesn’t say when she was married.

FA:  Turn it off for a minute. [RECORDING PAUSED] ’07.  Doesn’t it say that she was –?

RR:  It doesn’t say there, but it’s okay.  So your brother, Joseph, then was born in –

FA:  1908.

RR:  Right.  January 4, 1908.  And you were born then –

FA:  In 1909.

RR:  Okay.  Oh, I see it.  I see it.  It’s over this way.  Right.  You were born –

FA:  In 1909.

RR:  Right.  April 23, 1909.

FA:  That’s right.

RR:  So, could you say a little bit more about your mother then?

FA:  Yes.  My mother came at the age of thirteen to her sister.  As I say, they set up this couturier business in my aunt’s household. And she brought over all the other siblings.  Her father came with the two youngest children and settled them and stayed for about a year.  But her mother would never come to this country.  He finally decided to go back to their small town.  The subsequently had two more daughters.  Our family kept in touch with them until the onset of World War II, after which we never had any contact.  An aunt and uncle visited them at one time before Hitler and found them living in great poverty.  So, our family used to send money and clothes.  But everything was wiped out after or during World War II.

RR:  So, exactly where were they?  Do you remember?

AF:  Yeah.  If you’ll turn it off, I’ll show –

[RECORDING PAUSED

RR:  So they were living in Calvary after –?

FA:  From the beginning.  

RR:  From the beginning.  Right.

FA:  My mother would tell me how all the children would sleep in sort of bunk beds all together while she was growing up.  She loved her early years in Calvary and remained close to her sisters and brothers, and they remained close to her all their lives.

RR:  Now, Frances, your mother came over.  She met your father.  They got married.  Did your mother – ?  Your mother worked as a seamstress in the couturier –?

FA:  Well, once she was married, my father set up a household.  He bought a three-decker house on Edgewood Street in Roxbury.

RR:  Do you know the exact number?

FA:  Yeah.  It was 36 Edgewood Street in Roxbury.  It was then a non-Jewish section.  Edgewood was an appropriate name because it wasn’t long before it was near the edge of the woods, as it were, because we had a great big backyard where we planted flowers.  We took long walks and reached countryside fairly easily.  This was, of course, before 1918, when my father died.

RR:  And what did your father do?

FA:  My father was an insurance agent.  He was a very unusual father.  He really enjoyed being with his children.  He took us often to museums and libraries and to the beach.  I remember him taking us to the Boston Public Library and telling us the story of Sir Galahad, where the murals are there.  He really enjoyed our growing-up years and took us to the beach.  I remember standing on his shoulders and diving into the water.  My mother was usually left behind to do the household chores.  We were three little children at that time.  The oldest died when I was nine.  But he really cared about me.  I think I was his favorite child.  I think the memory of him spurred me on to have a college education and to be interested in learning.  Our home had the Book of Knowledge and the Ten Decisive Battles of the World.  I remember scribbles that I made over the pages.  And he was always telling us stories.  He was the one father that wheeled us in the baby carriage at a time when men didn’t do such things.  I remember his book.  He called it his debit/credit book.  It was a long book with everybody’s name in it.  He collected, I think it was called industrial insurance.  The few pennies a week that people gave him to insure their children at death.  Unfortunately, he died during the influenza epidemic in December 1918.  He went to work one day, and that night, my mother was called to the Massachusetts General Hospital.  The next day, he died.

RR:  Where was his work?  Where was his office?

FA:  He worked for the John Hancock Company, and it was right in Boston.

RR:  Downtown Boston?

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Do you remember what street it was or –?

FA:  No, I don’t.

RR:  And so your father – it was just very sudden.

FA:  It was extremely sudden.  And there couldn’t have been anyone less prepared to take on the responsibility of carrying on a household with three little children than my mother.  She always had rather extravagant tastes and never lived within her allowance.  I remember the altercations between the two of them about her spending ways.  She was a very loving mother and enjoyed her children, too.  I remember her making paper dresses for us on May Day.  We always had the prettiest dresses and danced around the May Pole in school in these colorful costumes.  She would take us also to the Public Garden.  When I would complain as a youngster that I wasn’t very pretty, not as pretty as my youngest sister, she said, “Oh, you have a beautiful neck.  That was because when I was pregnant with you, I used to watch the swans in Public Garden.”  So, she was a loving and dear mother.  But unfortunately, she had a psychological illness, and it disrupted our household more than once.  When I was in the third grade, I spent a school season with a relative and in a relative’s home.  My father visited frequently, but not my mother.  So, I just assumed that she was ill during that time.  And my fourth grade, I developed pneumonia followed by emphysema.  I landed at the Children’s Hospital.  The treatment then for that illness was to break a rib in my side, and the doctor would put his rubber-gloved finger into the hole, and that would let the pus come out.  I would scream when I saw him coming each day into the ward.  But after that, I was so depleted that they sent me to a convalescent home where the children were, each of them post-operative, I suppose, each in a wooden cart.  They would wheel themselves around this tremendous, big playroom.  And no one was allowed to walk.  There were weeks and weeks that we stayed there.  That was the second disruption.  Of course, the third disruption in the fifth grade was when my father died.  At first, my mother tried to keep the house together.  She got a job at Jordan Marsh’s alteration room.  She worked there, and some lovely neighbors would keep an eye on us.  We were all in school at the time.

RR:  So, it was your brother who was about a year older than you and your sister who was about –

FA:  About three years younger.  I think one of my mother’s sisters took her almost immediately.  No.  They took her after my mother – after our home was broken up.  But what I remember was – now, what did I remember?  I remember visiting this alteration room and standing at the doorway with my lovely neighbor and seeing my mother peddling this machine along with, I think, about twenty other women and feeling very, very low about it.  

RR:  Low about the fact that your mother had to do that?

FA:  Yes, and that she wasn’t with us anymore.  And finally, she just gave up, and the home was broken up.  My father, though he sold insurance, didn’t have any insurance on his life because he had a kidney condition.  So when he died, there was just this house – the equity in this three-decker house and workmen’s compensation.  He was a socialist.  I remember Eugene Debs was his idol.  He took me to some of the rallies, and he took me to synagogue, too.  I remember being on the steps of the synagogue.

RR:  Which synagogue was that?

FA:  This was Elm Street in Cambridge.  We lived in Cambridge because we rented out our place in Roxbury and went to Cambridge to live hoping that the air or something would help my mother.

RR:  This was –?

FA:  While my father was still living.  So that’s why he died while he was living in Cambridge, although he still owned the house in Roxbury.

RR:  So you actually went to school in Cambridge, then?

FA:  Yeah, for a while.  I remember being Betsy Ross in a little play that we put on in the hall.  Just before he died, the play was to be given.  No.  It was just after he died the play was to be given in the – I think it was the Wellington School in Cambridge.  The teacher took me aside and said, “Frances dear, you don’t have to go on with the play if you feel so badly about your father.”  I said, “But I do want to do my part.”  I got up there and did my part.   I just throw that in to show that the mourning feelings came much afterward.  In fact, when the Jewish Agency decided – I think one of my relatives felt that my brother was running around too much during the period that my mother was in charge of the household.  He brought the situation to the attention of the Jewish agency.  So they took my brother and me to the Home for Jewish Children, which was then located on Canterbury Street in Dorchester.  I remember the social worker, Rose Rabinowitz, who came to the house and took me and my brother and then picked up another couple – we went by streetcar – another brother and sister just about our own age.  We became lifelong friends with the brother.  The girl died soon afterward.

RR:  Now, how did your mother –?  How is your mother involved in this?  Was she willing to have you –?

FA:  Well, she was very ill at the time.  She just knew that we had to go.

RR:  Ill meaning what?

FA:  Well, this chronic illness that I spoke about.  

RR:  Was she laid up at home?  

FA:  Well, she was in bed at the time that we left.  I remember going to the Home on Canterbury Street.  When we got off the streetcar and walked down Canterbury Street, I ran ahead of the group, pointed out each house, and said, “Is this it?  Is this it?” as though I was going on a trip to camp or some temporary vacation.

RR:  So that’s how you understood it as kind of a temporary separation?

FA:  Yes, because nothing was explained to me.  When we got to the home, fortunately, it was a very progressive home.  I think some of my experiences there were enviable as far as some of the school friends I had who didn’t have a chance to have art lessons and go on – become part of a Campfire Girls’ group or be in a play or go on vacation up on a mountain in New Hampshire and sleep under the stars in tents.  In other words, there were very many assets to being in the home, but of course, nothing can replace the loneliness and the sadness of knowing that your father is dead and that your mother is – you don’t know where.  I cried many a sleepless night after I came to the realization that my warm, loving home was no more.  That impressed me so that from that time on, there was a feeling that nothing would do except that we should be reunited in our own home, my brother, sister, and I.

RR:  Now you said that your younger sister was taken by relatives.

FA:  She was taken by my mother’s sister.  That home was always open to me.  I spent many holidays, even vacations, while I was still in the home I spent with this aunt who had my sister.  I saw my sister quite often.

RR:  What about your brother?  Did you see your brother quite often?

FA:  Well, my brother was in the home with me.

RR:  Right.  But did you see each other every day?

FA:  Every day.  We became very, very close to each other.  I remember reading The Mill on the Floss when I was in high school.  There is emphasized the love of the sister and the brother.  I identified with that greatly.  So, my brother became very close.  When he would get into a fistfight with another boy, someone would call me and tell me that there was a fight going on behind the portable there, and I saw him fighting it was as though if he lost, I would lose everything.  But, of course, it was only a boyish fight, and it didn’t matter very much.  It didn’t have any consequences.

RR:  Is your brother still alive?

FA:  No.  But we were very, very close all our lives.  Unfortunately, his wife felt that that detracted from her marriage.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have a very good relationship between my sister-in-law and myself, which always bothered me.  But my brother managed somehow or other to keep in touch.  And I would very often see him without his family.  That didn’t happen right away.  Of course, the first few years of their marriage, things went well.  I never demanded anything materially of my brother, and he never demanded anything materially of me.  Although when he first went into business, I was working, and I gave him a few hundred dollars to get started on his business.  When I went to Radcliffe later on, I went through a loan or a gift from somebody.  As soon as I graduated, he gave me the money to repay the first year’s tuition.  So, we had a wonderful relationship. But somehow, just that perfection seemed to bother his wife.

RR:  So your brother lived to –?

FA:  Did you want to stop for a minute? 

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  So, we were then talking about Jewish observance also in your home as a child.

FA:  Well, in my home as a child, in my early home, we went to temple on holidays.  I went with my father, I remember mostly.  

RR:  What temple did you go to?

FA:  That was the one on Elm Street in Cambridge.

RR:  Was that an Orthodox shul?

FA:  Yes.  That was Orthodox.  

RR:  Did you have to sit upstairs?

FA:  Yes, yes, there was separation there.  In the home, of course, the observances were very regular because we said the Jewish prayer before meals.  We had services every Saturday and Friday night.  We learned Hebrew. 

RR:  You went to Hebrew school.

FA:  Well, it was right there in the home.

RR:  Oh, I see.  Your father or your mother taught you Hebrew?

FA:  No, no, neither.

RR:  Somebody would come in?

FA:  I don’t think I went to Hebrew school.  My brother went to Hebrew school, and that was it.  My brother went to Hebrew school when I was in my own home.  But I did not.  I was only nine.  I suppose I could have started.  But they weren’t giving girls Hebrew lessons in those days.  But in the home, I went to Hebrew school, and I won a few prizes.  But I don’t think my heart was in it.

RR:  So how did you win prizes if –?

FA:  Well I could learn the aleph-bes in the simple, very, very simple reading.

RR:  From your brother or –?

FA:  No, no, in Hebrew school in the home.

RR:  Oh, in the home, in the Jewish home that you went to.  I’m sorry.

FA:  Yeah.  My own home, I think, was more of a lay – we went on the high holidays.  I don’t remember going on the Sabbath.  My father took us to libraries, museums, and plays.  But I don’t remember ever going to the synagogue except on the high holidays.

RR:  This was the synagogue in Cambridge?

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Were your parents kosher?

FA:  No.  Now, wait a second.  I think my mother was kosher.  Yeah, my mother was kosher.  She wasn’t in later life because she had so little.  But she was kosher when we were little.  I remember that there was a great cleaning at Passover time.  

But in the home, I learned to read Hebrew.  And I always enjoyed following the Hebrew.  I’m not very adept at it.  Of course, I’ve forgotten a great deal of it.  But I go on High Holidays.  I went with my family on maybe a dozen times when it was not holidays.  But to go back to the home and my experiences there, I have always felt a great debt to the Jewish community because of my five years that I spent in the home.  If I had gone to a foster home, I don’t know what would have happened.  At any rate, it was while I was in the home that a social worker who became a supervisor for a few months in the home saw me and felt that I was college material.  She encouraged me to go to college, and she picked out Radcliffe.  

I think the Ladies’ Auxiliary would have liked me to go to Simmons, and they would’ve, I think, helped me get my first year’s tuition.  But she was adamant that Radcliffe was the place for me.

RR:  Was she a graduate of Radcliffe?  Do you know?

FA:  No, she wasn’t.  She went to Western Reserve.  Her name was Strauss, Lillian J. Strauss.  We kept up a correspondence for a long time.  She wrote me these beautiful letters, which, unfortunately, are lost.  She paid my first year’s tuition at Radcliffe.  Then, I got a  scholarship for the other years.  And as soon as I graduated – as I said, my brother said, “She’s a single woman.  She can use her own money.”  I think it was two hundred dollars.  “Here’s the two hundred dollars, and you pay it back to me.”

RR:  Now, before you went to Radcliffe, where did you go to school before then?  For example, when you were in the –?

FA:  When I was in the home, all of the children went to public school.  I went to the Wellington School in the fifth [and] sixth grade.

RR:  That was in Cambridge?

FA:  No, no.  I made a mistake.  Wellington, I’m sure now, was in Dorchester.  And then, I went to the Oliver Wendell Holmes School for my junior year and then to the Dorchester High School for Girls in my senior year.  I was very active in my school activities.  I was very stupid in the Wellington School because that was the year of transition.

RR:  You mean it was the year of transition when your father died?

FA:  Yeah, when I came from my own home to the orphanage.

RR:  You said also in your questionnaire that you had gone to the Greenwood School.  Was that before?

FA:  Greenwood.  That rings a bell.  But I can’t remember.

RR:  You don’t remember that?

FA:  No.  Maybe the Wellington was Cambridge, and this was – yes.  This was the Sarah Greenwood School in Roxbury, in Dorchester, and it was the Wellington School back in Cambridge.  That’s the difference.

RR:  So, you said you were in that year of transition, that you –

FA:  I remember I couldn’t learn the math, the arithmetic.  And the teacher would stand up in front of the class and say, “Five and six minus three times two.”  I would sit there trembling.  I never could get the right number.  But fortunately, the Judge Baker Foundation came down and gave IQ tests to all the kids.  Oh, I think they give IQ tests to all the kids in the school and not in the home, in the school.  I must have rated pretty good because they put me in the college course without asking anything.  I did very well in high school.  I remember reciting “In Flanders field the poppies grow between the crosses row and row” in the hall on May 30th.  

RR:  Was that a special assembly or something like that?

FA:  Yeah, you know, they were observing May 30th.  What is that day?

RR:  Armistice Day?

FA:  No, it wasn’t Armistice.  It was in May.  Oh, I’ve forgotten.  It’ll come to me.  At any rate, I threw myself into my books because I had nobody else.  All I had was my brother there in the home.  I soon discovered I liked what I saw in the books.  As I say, my father’s encouragement kept me involved.  In the library at the home, we got many big, big volumes of great literature that people donated.  I remember, on a Saturday afternoon, I would spend more time with these big, oversized books than out with the kids.  But I did enjoy outdoor activities.  And some of the happiest moments of my life were the outdoor camping excursions that were made.  There was a supervisor called Miss Fife in the home.  She had a very unusual understanding of what was going on in the world, in her world.  She would take each of the girls out on her afternoon off and take them to the theater or to a movie or something so that we knew there was another world outside of the home.  Although going to school with other kids was a very liberating experience.  As a matter of fact, my closest friends whom I kept until this day – whomever is living – were kids that were not in the home.  One of them to whom I’m very close, tells me that she envied me because I had all these interesting experiences.  We played basketball.  I had a garden plot right outside the walls of the home because it was a great expanse of land that was still undeveloped on Canterbury Street.  I remember the first year I came, I picked out the biggest plot of all and put seeds in almost a quarter of an acre because I could have as much space as I wanted.  And, of course, it was too much for me.  But I had my flower garden.  The Campfire Girls did very many interesting things.  As I say, the Ladies’ Auxiliary were very much involved with the holidays and the activities of the kids.  I remember we had a sewing class, and I made the dress that I wore to my grammar school graduation.  I made it in the sewing class.  I could pick out any material I wanted, any color.  I’m sure that was all due to the activities of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Home.  Some of the names I remember.  There was a Mrs. Freeman, a Mrs. Altman, and other lovely ladies that were like – well, they weren’t foster parents, but they cared about the Home and the kids in it.  So, they wanted us to have what the other children had in the schools.  And we did.  And the fact that we were – we never publicized the fact that we were home children, so we mixed in very well.

RR:  Now, Frances, how many children were in the Home altogether?

FA:  I think there were about two hundred and fifty.  That name rings a bell.  Maybe three hundred at any one time.  But I slept in a dormitory where my number was seventy-seven.  And it was written on all my clothes.  So I don’t think there were that many children.  Well, of course, there may have been more than one dormitory.

RR:  So you slept in –?  There was a girls' dormitory, and you each had your own bed and a dresser or some kind of –?

FA:  Yeah.  We took showers with five or six other girls.  To this day, I have no modesty about my body, and I’m sure it comes from that group shower, whereas my daughter can’t conceive of such a thing as taking a shower with anybody else.  But I have an open feeling about that because of the group shower.  We did some very adventuresome things for the 1920s, like going to swim in the YMCA pool on Cabot Street in Boston and going to Reindeer Island, which is an island in the harbor.  The superintendent of the home was a very interesting person.  His name was Drucker, D-R-U-C-K-E-R.  He wrote a book, which I later found in the Wagoner Library, called Children Astray.  That was written about some of the problem children in – he had been superintendent in a Baltimore home.  Saul Drucker was his name.  S-A-U-L  Drucker.  In a Baltimore Home before.  Whether he described some of the children in our home, I’m not sure.  I remember going through it and not recognizing any of the – but he was one of the early pioneers who wrote about children’s problems.  I knew his wife, of course, and his daughter.  They had a private suite in the home.  Lillian, the daughter, and I saw each other quite often.  He had a tragic ending, Saul Drucker did, unfortunately.

RR:  What happened?

FA:  Well, after he left the home, he ran a private camp.  As a matter of fact, while I was at Radcliffe, during the summers, I became a counselor there.

RR:  What was the name of the camp?

FA:  The name of the camp was camp – oh, I remember names so well, but I can’t think of it right now.  Maybe I’ll come back to it.

RR:  Do you remember where it was?

FA:  Yes, it was in Billerica, Mass.  While he was in the home, he was a wonderful superintendent.  He had that paternal relationship with the children.  There was always a joke.  He had a wonderful sense of humor.  He was a very fat man.  As a matter of fact, I’m sure it was his wife who wrote the book because she had a literary strain that I recognized.  [She] was the active one, but he signed the book.  His name was on the book, not hers.  So, the feminists can get a boot out of that and feel badly about that.  They had one daughter whom they indulged.  I remember once she went to Latin school.  And one day, it was raining terribly hard.  Mrs. Drucker sent one of the boys with her rubbers and an umbrella out to the Latin school to bring her home.

RR:  One of the boys from the home?

FA:  From the home, yeah.  She was on a different level.  In treatment, of course, she never ate with us.  They had their private dining room.  But she and I were friends.  They probably thought I was a good influence.  But she was bright.  She didn’t need me.  But we had a lot in common.  Anyhow, the home was a mixed blessing.  For many years, I couldn’t talk about it.  When I was at Radcliffe and even afterward, I certainly never publicized that I came from the home.  It’s only within the last few years when I’ve read autobiographies of people who are much more deprived in their youth than I, that I’ve been able to talk freely about – I think what kept me from talking was the fact that it seemed like a failure that my home was broken up.  Of course, it wasn’t.  But I always felt I was a little different from the people around me because all of my friends were not children from the home.

RR:  What happened to the home?  How long did it last?

FA:  The home lasted just a few years after I left.  I spent one year as a mother’s helper in a very lovely family, the Bergson family.  They became very close friends.  Then, I went to Radcliffe.  I lived with an aunt who lived in Cambridge.

RR:  So the Bergson family lived in Cambridge.

FA:  No, no, they didn’t.  They lived in Dorchester.  So that I couldn’t go to Radcliffe from Dorchester.  I was penniless.  

RR:  So you graduated from high school.  You went to Dorchester High School.

FA:  Yeah.  I was very active in the girls’ high school.  I was in every club, and I was secretary of the class of 1926, I think it was.  I had a good time in high school.  

And as I say, when it came time to decide whether I go to Simmons and the ladies would see that my tuition was paid, Lillian Strauss insisted.  Of course, told me all the wonders that Radcliffe would bring to me.  I did go to Radcliffe.  But I had to live in Cambridge.  I had this aunt who was living in Cambridge.  She was married, of course, and had two children.

RR:  Was this an aunt from your father’s side?

FA:  No, no, my mother’s sister.

RR:  Oh, your mother’s sister, the seamstress.

FA:  Mother’s younger sister.

RR:  Younger sister.

FA:  Yeah.  Unfortunately, her temperament and mine were not in –

RR:  Sync?

FA:  In sync.  As I look back over it, she was very bright and was deprived of many, many advantages because she came when she was nine years old to this country.  Although she went to school a little bit here, she lived with this older sister of my mother’s that I said was so enterprising.  

RR:  What was the other sister’s name?

FA:  Her name was Bessie Jaffe.  She was a wonderful character, you know.  Whenever there was a holiday, she had all the children come together and would celebrate.  I remember the Fourth of July was her son’s birthday and we all got things to pop off – fireworks.  At any rate, this aunt, Rose, the youngest sister, lived with her.  She died in the influenza epidemic one week after my father’s death.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

RR:  – Mrs. Addelson for the Jewish Women’s Archive by Rochelle Ruthchild on October 18, 1997.  So you said, Frances, that first your father died, and within a week, your mother’s older sister died, who is the one who seems to have been the glue that held the whole family together.

FA:  That’s right.  That’s right.

RR:  Both of the influenza, from the Spanish flu.

FA:  Yeah.  Now, there was a younger sister of my mother.

RR:  And what was her name?

FA:  Her name was Rose Sugarman.  She got married because she had no vocation to take care of herself.

RR:  She was the one who lived in Cambridge?

FA:  Yeah.  So, she married Sugarman.  She had her home there.  Before I came to the Home, she had had one of the Jaffe children that she was taking care of.

RR:  The Jaffe children, meaning from your aunt, your older aunt.

FA:  The older aunt who had died suddenly.

RR:  Right.

FA:  There was a very young child, and that young child went to live with Rose Sugarman.  She had just recently been married and had this boy in her home.  And then, when he left to go back to his father’s home, she was asked by her other sister to take me.  It would be a (shunder?) for Frances to live in somebody else’s home even though I was perfectly happy in Dorchester.  Perhaps I could have gone to Radcliffe from Dorchester.  But it just seemed as if I could save the carfare, it was a better choice.

RR:  So just briefly, then.  You were at the home for how many years?

FA:  For five years.  Then, one year as a mother’s helper.

RR:  For the Bergsons.

FA:  With the Bergsons.

RR:  In Dorchester.

FA:  Yeah.  When I graduated high school, when I decided I was going to Radcliffe, it seemed much more sensible to live in Cambridge within walking distance of Harvard Square than to continue living with the Bergsons.

RR:  Now, where was your mother through all of this?

FA:  Well, that was one of the problems.  No one told me where my mother was.

RR:  And your mother never visited you when you were at the Home?

FA:  No.

RR:  Your brother and yourself.  And you never knew why that was.

FA:  Well, we finally found her in a – I did find that she was in a – first, she was in a sanatorium. And I visited her there.

RR:  That was while you were in the home you finally found her.

FA:  You want to turn it off? [RECORDING PAUSED] Her sisters supported the idea that I reunite the family.  Of course, I was in Radcliffe.  I couldn’t do it then.  The minute I got out of Radcliffe, we got together and established a home.

RR:  With your mother?

FA:  With my mother, yeah.

RR:  So, just to get back to – During the time you were in Radcliffe, you lived in Cambridge.  Can you say what street you lived on?

FA:  Yes.  I lived at 12 Maple Avenue in Cambridge, which is now part of Harvard.  It’s, I think, their health clinic.

RR:  Maple Avenue?

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  And that was where your aunt –?

FA:  Is this on now?

RR:  Yes.  This is your aunt who lived there.

FA:  My aunt lived in Maple Avenue.  As I say, I walked to Radcliffe every day.

RR:  And that was actually a Jewish area at that point, wasn’t it?

FA:  Oh, no.

RR:  It wasn’t?

FA:  There were a few Jewish families but many more non-Jewish.  I think it became Jewish, maybe afterward.

  

RR:  And this was in the 1920s?  When did you go into –?

FA:  I went to Radcliffe in ’26, and I got out in ’30.  In those years, as I say, I attended Radcliffe, and I was babysitting for my aunt.  

RR:  You mean for your aunt’s children?

FA:  My aunt’s children, yeah.  She had two children at the time.  After I left, she had another.  I took care of the younger one, who was about two, I think, at the time, two to maybe one to five while I was there.  My closest relative is her daughter.  And to this day, she’s my closest cousin.

RR:  What’s her name?

FA:  Her name is Betty Lifson, L-I-F-S-O-N.  She’s in Florida, and we’ve kept in very close touch, exchanging visits and calls.  We call each other quite frequently.   Unfortunately, now that we’re older, we’re unable to get together as often.  But we’re still trying to figure out how we can see each other.  She lives in Sarasota and in an assisted living setup.  She has her own apartment.   It’s run by a Jewish agency.  She’s very happy there.  It was hard for her to make the decision, but it turned out to be an excellent one.  

RR:  Frances, I just want to just go back to your time at Radcliffe.  If you could talk a little bit about what that was like, how many other Jewish people were there, Jewish students – what kind of educational – what it was like for you coming out of the home as a poor child of immigrants to go to Radcliffe?

FA:  Well, of course, the girls in the dormitory were far afield from me.  But there was a nucleus of Jewish girls that traveled by streetcar from Dorchester to Radcliffe –

RR:  So the girls who lived in the dorms, the young women who lived in the dorms, they were mostly not Jewish?  Is that the case?

FA:  I think there were a few Jewish names.  There weren’t too many.  And, of course, they were extremely wealthy.  Jeanette Rabinowitz of the Rabb family was in my class.  She lived in the dorms.  But those girls were unapproachable as far as I was concerned.  There was a group of about eight Jewish girls who traveled from Dorchester to Radcliffe every day.  We’d have lunch in the lunchroom.  We would carry our lunch and sit together in there.  They became very, very close friends, of course.  They knew I had been in the home because we were quite intimate.  We knew each other’s history very well.  Unfortunately, I did not get the benefit of a good Radcliffe education as I should have.  It was in the days when the professors came to Radcliffe to give their courses.  There were some nationally known professors on the faculty, of course.

RR:  These are Harvard male professors.

FA:  These were the Harvard professors.  But I was so intent on being ready to get a job as soon as I got out of Radcliffe that I concentrated in what they call Social Ethics, and that meant a sort of Sociology and Psychology.  Psychology at that time was in its infancy.  Now let me see.  I don’t think that Freud was even – yes, of course, he was mentioned.  I remember the Psychology of Animals and, of course, Social Ethics – the morals and reading about the dukes and the [inaudible] and the inheritance of social attributes and a lot of misinformation.  At any rate, I loved literature, and I always have.  I didn’t take advantage of [inaudible] Blake and some of the other great names.  I did study the Bible.  Now let me see.  Kittridge was the literature name that I thought of.  [inaudible] Blake was the New Testament and the Old Testament professor.  I did take the Old Testament.  I studied under the Gluecks, G-L-U-E-C-K-S, who were forerunners of criminology.  I did my thesis under Eleanor Glueck.

RR:  And what was your thesis?

FA:  My thesis was the extended use of public schools using the schools for social purposes after the regular sessions.  I remember going with Mrs. Glueck to some of the schools where they had just begun experimenting with using the hallowed halls for purposes other than traditional learning.

RR:  Oh, you were way ahead of your time.  Now it’s coming back to that again.

FA:  Well, yes, that’s true.  It took a long time to catch on.  And, of course, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck wrote about the criminals and how to anticipate – how a judge can anticipate sentencing on the basis of past history.  They became quite famous for their studies.  I knew them quite well.  

RR:  Could you –?

FA:  Excuse me.  I do want to tell you I did take the course on Jewish history given by that famous – oh dear, what was his name?  Just a little tiny bit of a man who gave – I remember Rabbi Shubow’s intended bride was in the class.  It was a small class in Jewish history.  Wolfson gave that course, which was a wonderful course on the history of the Jewish people.  What else in Radcliffe?  I didn’t belong to any of the clubs of after-school activities.  Swimming, which has been a lifelong activity of mine – I couldn’t even belong to the swimming club at Radcliffe.  In contrast to my busy extracurricular activities in high school, I did nothing at Radcliffe extracurricular.  When my name came up for Phi Beta Kappa, they turned me down.  One of the girls – one of the members of Phi Beta, told me because I had not participated in extracurricular activities.  So, I did get honors thesis.  I did write to get honors for my thesis.  But I’d hoped to get magna. 

I simply mention it.  I haven’t thought about it for a long, long time.  But I think one of the reasons I married my husband was because he was a Summa Cum Laude at Tufts.  I mean, that was just one of the factors that intrigued me.

RR:  But you graduated Radcliffe as what –?

FA:  With honors.

RR:  Cum laude?

FA:  Cum laude, yeah.

RR:  Did you, while you were there, experience any antisemitism?

FA:  We accepted it.  It was very interesting.  We didn’t accept the real anti-Semitism.  But I saw a letter at the Semitic Museum from the president of Harvard.  I can’t remember names.  Who said very – in an open letter – that there should be quotas at Harvard for the Jews because if they were allowed to be admitted, they would take over the whole –

RR:  Was it Lowell then or –?

FA:  Was it Lowell who wrote it?  I think it was Lowell.  Yeah.  He was the one that came just before me.  That letter was displayed in the Semitic Museum.

RR:  That Jews would take over the university.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  If there wasn’t a quota.

FA:  Yeah.  We accepted the quota.  We knew that there was a quota.  It wasn’t until after I graduated that I saw a sign in a hotel where I had been, where I had spent the night which said, “We do not welcome Jews or others of a certain ilk,” that I spoke up and said to the proprietor, “We wouldn’t have stayed here if we knew you had that policy.”

RR:  But it’s also interesting that they let you stay there.

FA:  Well, they didn’t know we were Jewish, I suppose.  My name was Pass at the time, P-A-S-S.  I was with a girl named (Rheingold?).  And it was a time when people were beginning to feel that this was a little foolish and a little self-destructive on the part of hoteliers.

RR:  This is in the early 1930s?    

FA:  Yes.  Yes.  Soon after I was out of Radcliffe, I remember going up to the White Mountains.  There was that sign that we saw as we left. 

RR:  But you said while you were in Radcliffe, you were basically – you were there to get through and get an education.  You didn’t get involved with extracurricular activities.

FA:  No.  And I didn’t take the courses that I really felt close to because I knew I had to earn a living.

RR:  You said that there was antisemitism, but you just didn’t – you just kind of let it be.

FA:  Well, I don’t know if it was really antisemitism.  You just felt that the non-Jewish girls weren’t interested in you and you had enough to do to follow your own curriculum.  I didn’t have a full life.  I had a very limited life during my four years at Radcliffe.

RR:  But could it also have been –?  I mean, did anybody ever say anything to you that was antisemitic to your face?

FA:  No, absolutely not.  Oh, there was a Jewish group that met and had teas at Radcliffe.  I’m trying to think of what the name of it was.  It wasn’t Hadassah or Hillel, but it had a name.  All the Jewish girls would meet there and have their exchange.  We felt sort of concerned for each other.  If there was an underlying antisemitic feeling – I remember when I was given a freshman – when I was a senior, I was given a Jewish girl.  I don’t know what that would mean.  Whether they felt that she would be more at home with me.

RR:  You mean to be a sponsor for a freshman?

FA:  Yeah.  We once had a party.  We once had a party on the grounds.  We rented sort of – there was a little house on the grounds at Radcliffe.  And we wanted to celebrate the graduation of one of our friends from law school.  So we had a party on the grounds.  The next day, I was called before the dean, who said that there were liquor bottles left around.  She was very stern with me.  I’m sure I was the most innocent person there.  But we had rented the little house under my name.  I had a feeling that she felt that this group, this group of Jewish people, were not as nice in their manners as some of the other people who had used the house.

RR:  Wasn’t this during prohibition also?

FA:  It must have been.

RR:  Yeah.

FA:  Yeah.  Some of the boys that we invited may have had liquor bottles.  I didn’t know that anybody was drinking excessively.  I didn’t notice it and I certainly wasn’t.  But I suppose I should have been more responsible to see that the whole thing was cleaned up since it was on my name.

RR:  But nobody ever said anything to you specifically about being Jewish?

FA:  No, nothing.

RR:  You obviously went through the Jewish quota.  I mean, you made it through the Jewish quota.  Were you observant at that time at all, Jewishly, other than through the social club that you were involved with?

FA:  I don’t think I’m an observant Jew.  I identify myself as a Jew.  I’m very proud of the fact and I always was proud of the fact that I’m part of the Jewish race because all my friends were Jewish.  Until I went to work – I went to work.  As soon as I got out of Radcliffe, I got a job at the Traveler’s Aid Society through Dr. Eleanor Glueck because she was my –

RR:  She was your advisor?

FA:  – advisor at Radcliffe.  Through her intercession, she got me a job at the Traveler’s Aid Society of Boston.  We were located right at South Station, sometimes at North Station, and sometimes at a ship because ships from Europe were still coming into Boston Harbor in the early ’30s.  I got a job there.  

I was the first girl in my class at Radcliffe to get work because it was the height of the Depression in 1930.  I needed to get a job because I knew a job meant reuniting my family.  So, I got this job.  Then, I worked for the state, and I began to get friends outside of the Jewish circle.  But I can’t say that I ever kept a kosher house.  We haven’t come to my married life yet, but it was important that the children go to Hebrew school and to Sunday school.  We joined the temple fairly early.  

RR:  Do you want to say a little bit more about your job and then talk about how you met your husband?

FA:  Yes.  I worked for the Travelers’ Aid Society.  And then, I was offered a job by the Jewish Agency, the Associated Jewish Philanthropies.  So, I left the Travelers’ Aid after about a year or two and worked for the Jewish agency for about two or three years.

RR:  Now, the Travelers’ Aid, just to be clear, this was not for tourists as much as for immigrants.

FA:  Oh, no, no.  This was for runaway children, for old people, for lost children, for an immigrant, for anyone who was not familiar with Boston.  We had a desk right in South Station at the stations.  Anybody who needed help, we would be able to refer them to where they could get lodging or how to travel across the city.  It was not for tourists at all.  It was to pick up social problems.  Then, we would refer to an agency that would work with the individual.  But we were on the spot and sort of trained to find out where people were.  I remember it was twenty-five dollars a week.  It was a wonderful salary for that time.  From that time on, I began to feel quite independent.  Then I worked for the Jewish Agency that had an office at – I think it was 21 Bradshaw Street in Dorchester.  I lived not too far from there.  That’s when we re-established our home.  My brother, sister, and I got together and got my mother.  We had our own family once again.  It meant a great deal to us.

RR:  Where did you live in Dorchester at that point?

FA:  At that point, I lived in two different places.  Once I lived on – the first home we got was on the streetcar line on Washington Street in Dorchester near Grove Hall.

RR:  Do you remember what number on Washington Street?

FA:  No, but it was very near Grove Hall.  We lived in an apartment building.  And then a nice neighbor told us about a lovely apartment where we wouldn’t be on the streetcar line right on – I’ve forgotten the name of that street.  It wasn’t very far.  So we moved there.

RR:  And when you say we – so, in other words, as soon as you got your Traveler’s Aid Society job –

FA:  We rented this place.

RR:  And you brought your mother in?

FA:  Yeah.  And some of the money – some of the industrial insurance went to buy the furniture.  You know my father had these insurances on us that one of the aunts kept up.  So there was enough to buy furniture for the new apartment.  

RR:  You lived there with your brother and your younger sister and your mother?

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  At that point, what was your brother doing?

FA:  He got a job in a cleaning place.

RR:  So, did he go to college?

FA:  He went for a couple of years.  He went to law school.

RR:  What law school?  Do you remember?

FA:  It wasn’t the most prestigious one.  It was a night school.  But he was not a student.  He was a loveable, dear, wonderful brother, but he was not a student.  And he got this job cleaning in a cleaning store.  Finally, he bought his own cleaning business and set it up on – he called it the Pass Cleansers, the Pass Cleansers on Commonwealth Avenue in Newton, Newton Center.

RR:  So he commuted out from Dorchester.  Oh, this is later.

FA:  Yeah.  That was later.  I remember I had already been working, and I gave him – I lent him money to buy the store or to set up the business or something like that.  He paid me back right away.  And when he bought a house, I gave him a few hundred dollars, and he paid me back right away.  We had a wonderful relationship except, as I said, as far as my sister-in-law was concerned.  But to go back to moving – oh, and then, we followed the route of the Jewish migration.  First in Roxbury, then in Dorchester – no, I started in Dorchester in the home.  Then I went to Roxbury, two places in Roxbury near Grove Hall.  Then, a nice neighbor told me about a place on Radcliffe Road in Brighton.  So, we moved there.  We had bigger rooms and more privacy.

RR:  Was there a Jewish community in Brighton when you got there or –?

FA:  That was--.  No we were on the goyische side.  Commonwealth Avenue divides the Jewish side of going into Brookline and then the Brighton side going into, you know, the non-Jewish side.

RR:  So, in other words, if you’re heading out on Commonwealth Avenue out of Boston towards Boston College, on the left-hand side is the Jewish side, and the right-hand side is the –?

FA:  Absolutely.  Very interesting.  We were on that side for a few years.  And then when my – it happened to be a very lovely apartment.  It was Radcliffe Road.

RR:  And this is, again, you, your brother, and your sister.

FA:  Yes.  Then she got a job in New York.  She worked for World Peace Foundation here on Beacon Hill, on Mount Vernon Street.  Her boss went to New York.  I remember we had some heartrending meetings.  We decided that she should go to New York with her boss, that there were more opportunities there for her.  So when she left and my brother got married, it left my mother and me in an apartment that we couldn’t swing.

RR:  That was the one in Brighton?

FA:  Yeah.  Well, it was really Allston.  So, we moved to – my mother and I moved to Carroll Avenue in Brighton.

RR:  So could you say what number Radcliffe Road you lived on?

FA:  I can’t.  But I think I could say it was 11 Carroll Avenue.

RR:  In Brighton.

FA:  In Brighton.

RR:  Still on the –?

FA:  Yeah.  My mother and I went there.

RR:  To the goyische side?

FA:  No.  This was already on the Jewish side.  But there were many non-Jewish people there, too.  But on our street, I think there were mostly – at that time, it was half and half in that section. 

RR:  This is Allston or Brighton.

FA:  This is, I think, it was called Brighton.  It’s down near that food store, Allston Street.  It must be Allston.

RR:  Near Harvard Street?

FA:  No.  Nearer Harvard Street was the Jewish section.  This was up at the other end that goes into Washington Street.  My mother and I were left alone.  Oh, I meant to say that I changed my job again.  I had a very – getting out of Radcliffe, I took some civil service examinations: one for parole officer and one for the head social worker at the Reformatory for Women.  Well, my name came out first on both lists.  I had been to Radcliffe, and I knew how to take tests.  So, I was offered this job at a big, big jump in salary as head social worker at the Reformatory.

RR:  Where was the Reformatory?

FA:  It was in Framingham.

RR:  Oh, which is now Framingham Prison for Women.

FA:  That’s right.  So, I spent two years out there as the head social worker.

RR:  How did you commute out there?

FA:  I didn’t.  I lived there.

RR:  Oh, you did.  I see.  And where was your mother then?  She came with you?

FA:  No.  She didn’t come to the Reformatory.

RR:  Oh, I see.  You actually lived on the grounds of the Reformatory.

FA:  Yeah.  And I would go home weekends.

RR:  Your mother lived in town.  But was your mother working at all or--?

FA:  Well, my mother was always supported by her three children.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  We always gave – we started out with five dollars each a week.  That was fifteen dollars a week that she had to get by on.  She never got by on the fifteen dollars.  She always bought something that was very beautiful or had good quality.  But she went beyond her limited expense.  So, she was always a chore, a burden.  I loved her very much to the very end, but she always was my concern.  It interfered with my marriage, of course.  I wasn’t able to really make a logical differentiation so that I could please both if it is at all possible.  But anyhow, I was two years at the reformatory.  I had a wonderful experience there.  Miriam Van Waters was the superintendent, and she was the enemy of the politicians and the State House, [Former Governor of Massachusetts, James Michael] Curley especially.  He tried to get rid of her.  She did a wonderful job with the prisoners.  But they felt in the State House that she was too indulgent.  My job was very interesting because although I only had two paid workers, state employees, I had about fifteen – what they call – interns.  Those were young women right out of college who couldn’t find jobs in their own field and came as volunteers living at the reformatory, just as I was.  Each of them had duties around the reformatory with the women prisoners, but they would also carry social work cases.  I supervised them.

RR:  And could you say what years those were that you worked there?

FA:  I was there from 1934 to 1936.  

RR:  How many inmates were there on average?

FA:  There was an average of about three hundred and fifty or four hundred, and that’s only a guess, inmates.  And there were about – I think there were about four Jewish inmates.  I remember two or three rather clearly.  But it was a very low amount.  One girl was diagnosed as feeble-minded.  She was limited mentally.  Another had been sent to the Bridgewater as incorrigible by some judge.  She was limited mentally, too, much more so than the other girl.  Then, there was one that was a prostitute.  I think there were only three at the time.  An out-and-out prostitute.

RR:  Did you like your work out there?

FA:  Oh, I liked it very much.  We had to present social histories of these girls to the parole board.  The parole board would make their decision as to whether a girl could go out into the community or not on the basis of our history.  So our social workers had to go out into the community and get a whole picture of what was there for the girl [and] what resources were there for her rehabilitation.  We had to study the girl in the institution as to what her capabilities were.  It was a very stimulating job.  But I met my husband just in ’36.  He didn’t have a penny to his name.  He got out of Tufts and then went to work for a year.  He had a sick father.  And had a younger brother and an older brother.  The older brother got married.  When he got out of Tufts, he had to go to work and save money to go back to Tufts to get a master’s degree.  He got the master’s on scholarship, but he had to save up the money for his family because they were depending on the two boys supporting them.  The father was very ill.  At any rate, I met my husband.  We realized that we couldn’t get together very often if I was out in Framingham.

RR:  How did you meet your husband?

FA:  I was introduced to him by a friend, a mutual friend, who felt that we would do well together, and we did. [laughter]  I remember the Gluecks were looking for an investigator for their research.  They asked me if I knew of anybody.  And I thought of this – I had just met my husband.  He was looking for a job at the same time he was doing – I think he was doing fieldwork in teaching English at English High and getting very little money for it.  But he wasn’t the type to go into these rough neighborhoods and kowtow with delinquents.  But that’s how this mutual friend thought we would work out.  I could help him, and we would be – he felt that we would be on the same wavelength, and we were.  So, anyhow, I fortunately had that parole officer – I was on that list, so I asked for a transfer, and I didn’t have to lose any money.  So I took that job and –

RR:  That brought you back into Boston.

FA:  That brought me back to Boston.  And immediately, the first thing I did was I wanted a trip to Europe.  So, I took every cent I had out of the – this was after our home was established.  Our home was established in ’30.  So, this was ’37.

RR:  This was on Carroll Avenue, where you were living?

FA:  No.  We were still at that time on Radcliffe Road.  I’m not sure.  I’m not sure where I was living.  At any rate, I went to the bank, and I took out five hundred dollars, and I decided I wanted to see Europe.  I had worked and saved up that money.  My brother encouraged me to go.  He was already married by then.  Yeah.  He was already married.  I went to Europe.  I got a girlfriend, an Irish girlfriend, and we went to Europe for five weeks.  I went for five weeks.  She stayed with me for three weeks, and then [for] two weeks, I was on my own.

RR:  And where did you go in Europe?

FA:  Well, I picked out the capitals, of course.  First, we landed in Ireland for her interests.  Then, we went to London, and Paris and Rome, and, of course, Florence and down to Capri into the boot. 

RR:  You didn’t go up to Germany?

FA:  We didn’t go near Germany.  But we had a fascinating trip over and back.  We went over on an English ship.  And coming back, we met some refugees.  We met a young refugee boy younger than I.  But there was a group of about five or six of us who were unattached people.  He was one of them.  A refugee, he must have come from a very wealthy family because there was no talk about being oppressed or anything like that.  We were on an Italian boat.

RR:  What do you mean no talk--?  So he didn’t talk at all about –?  He was German, though.

FA:  Yeah.  He was Jewish German.

RR:  A German Jew.

FA:  Right.  And this was coming back.  We played games, danced, and had fun.  But there was no sadness about him that he was going to a relative in this country.  I have pictures of him and –

RR:  You never kept up with him after that or –?

FA:  No, no.  His Jewishness wasn’t important.  I mean, he was just one of the group.  I knew he was Jewish, and he probably knew I was Jewish.  Going over, of course, we were on an English boat.  We have pictures of ourselves, you know, on the lounge chairs with the – being served English tea on the deck of the steamer.

RR:  Do you have those pictures still?

FA:  Yeah.  I have them.  Would you like to see?

RR:  I’m thinking that maybe we could – if might be something that people might want to contact you about using later.

FA:  Yeah.  They’re not very good pictures.  I took them on a Brownie, and they’re a little faded.  It was a time when no one was going to Europe.  It was ’37.  And it surprises me that I was so little affected about what was going on in Germany.

RR:  And what about in Italy?  You were in Mussolini’s Italy.  And that didn’t affect you.

FA:  No, no, none whatsoever.  Someone once tried to steal some money from me.  But not because of my Jewishness.

RR:  So, even though you were in Europe, you knew not to go to Germany.  I mean, you didn’t go to Germany because you knew that it was dangerous for a Jew.

FA:  They didn’t want me.  Apparently, I wasn’t in touch with what was going on because I never worried about it.  I just knew something was wrong there.

RR:  So, you didn’t apply to go for a visa or anything.

FA:  Oh, no, no.  They wouldn’t have given it to me anyhow, I’m sure.  I was sorry I didn’t go to Russia, though.  My father had one relative in this country, a cousin, who urged me to go.  But I couldn’t see – I wanted to see the capitals.  I’d studied all my life about these different Western countries.  She said my father’s family was her family, too, of course, since they were first cousins.  Unfortunately, I didn’t.  Well, I couldn’t have taken so much time.  I took five weeks as it was.  I planned to go three weeks, and then I telegraphed my boss and asked if I could stay another week – no, four weeks – if I could stay another week alone.  And he said, “Yes.”  So, I stayed.  But I couldn’t think of going to Russia in ’37.

RR:  Because?

FA:  Well, it would be too long a trip.  But if I had any sense – I mean, if I had the feeling for roots that I do now, I’d love to know about my father’s family, but the family was allowed to live in Moscow.

RR:  Right.  It is unusual, very unusual.

FA:  I went back about ten years ago.  I went to Russia ten years ago.  I stood on the synagogue steps there and did think of my father that he had stood on those steps, too.  And when I went to Russia, I went with a group of social workers.  I did seek out a Jewish community and went to a service.  Was it a service?  It was some kind of a get-together of Jewish people.

RR:  In the synagogue or in a home?

FA:  I’m trying to think.  I think it was some kind of a makeshift synagogue.

RR:  In a home?

FA:  I think so.  And we had to sneak, sort of sneak away from the group.  Now, when did I go?  I went not so long ago.  My husband was still living.  He didn’t go with me.  So, it must have been – I think it was while Rabbi Mehlman was starting to make contacts in Moscow.

RR:  So, it was still when it was the Soviet Union then?

FA:  Yes, oh, yes.  But we did see these people, and they showed us pictures of their American relatives.  I remember one brought me a bunch of lilacs.  They were very – they were very warm with us and wanted to talk more.  But we were sort of sneaking away to see them.  I think I would have been more open, but my companion felt that she didn’t want to get involved, so I followed her.

RR:  Was she Jewish, also?

FA:  Yes.  She was Jewish.

RR:  I want to go back to your father again and your mother.  Did they talk much about life in Europe?

FA:  Oh, yes.  They talked Yiddish.  They always talked English in the home.  But I think they did talk Yiddish occasionally if they didn’t want us to understand.  But they both had no accents whatsoever.  They were completely Americanized.

RR:  But they did speak Yiddish, probably amongst themselves.

FA:  Oh, yes.  They loved the Jewish theater.  I remember my mother getting all dressed up [for] an evening with my father and saying goodnight to us.  And they would go to the Jewish theater.

 

RR:  Where was the Jewish theatre?

FA:  The Jewish theater was in a place called – is there a place called Castle in Boston?  Castle was the beginning of the name of the playhouse.  It was down around the South End.  They would tell us about the stories that they heard on the stage.  That was their big entertainment outside of family activities.

RR:  Did they go often to the theater?  Do you remember?

FA:  Yes.  They went often to the Jewish theater.  I never heard them go to the movies or anything like that.  But if they were going out, they were going to see a Jewish play.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

RR:  This is tape two of an interview with Frances Pass Addelson for the Jewish Women’s Archive on October 18, 1997.  The interviewer is Rochelle Ruthchild.  This is side one of tape two.

FA:  I just want to say that – I want to make it clear that I am very grateful to the Jewish community for their intercession in my life so that I had a chance to develop whatever abilities I had.  I’m also grateful to the colleges that made my education and my husband’s education possible.  I have given money to both Radcliffe and Tufts, where he got his scholarships.  I have set up a fund at the University of Mass in memory of my son, who committed suicide in 1970.  

He always wanted to go to Israel.  I was a little fearful about allowing him because he wasn’t well near the end of his life.  My gift is to allow a student to go to Israel and do volunteer work on behalf of the government of Israel, like digging on a dig or something like that.  This would cover his living expenses during that time – his or her.  So, those are the three charities that I’ve given to.  Of course, I give every year to the Associated Jewish Philanthropies.  So, that’s the way I want to express my appreciation for the help I’ve been given along the way.  That’s all.  Now, to go back to my narrative, I don’t remember where I was.

RR:  I was asking you if your parents talked at all about Europe.

FA:  Oh, well, my father used to communicate [and] would write letters to his family.  He told me about his sister [who] meant a lot to him.  I think he equated me with her.  I have a lovely picture of my father’s two brothers and a friend, quite debonair, young men who got together.  One lived in Paris, and one in Moscow.  And somehow or other, they met, and I have that picture.  He was very close to his family, to his parents.  As I say, he wrote letters and would show them to me.  But unfortunately, I never had any contact with them.  I’m very sorry that when I did go to Europe that I didn’t include Moscow.

RR:  So, you know that your father still had family in Moscow?

FA:  Yes, because this cousin who lived in Rhode Island and who came to my wedding urged me to visit them when I went in 1937.  Now, did I tell you that I didn’t go?

RR:  Yes.

FA:  Is it on the tape?

RR:  Yeah.

FA:  Yeah.  I didn’t go because, at that time in my life, I wasn’t as interested in roots.

RR:  And you don’t know what happened to your father’s family?

FA:  No.  No, and I didn’t have any addresses.  I did write a letter using the address that she gave me.  But I never got the letter back, and I never got a response from it.

RR:  You mean that was –?  When did you write the letter?

FA:  Oh, I wrote the letter maybe thirty years ago, forty years ago.

RR:  You mean after World War II?

FA:  Yeah.  

RR:  It would have been dangerous then really to respond to you.

FA:  Probably.

RR:  Do you still have the address?  

FA:  Oh, I don’t think so.  I had a chance once to get in touch with the son of this cousin.  I was given his address, and I never followed up.  He was an eminent doctor.  I somehow felt a little embarrassed to reach out to him, which I should have done, of course.  But I didn’t.  So, my father has been a sort of – his memory has been a beacon to me in everything I’ve done.  Probably, I’m over-emphasizing his good qualities.  He must have had failings like everybody else.  But he’s been a motivating force in most of my life.

RR:  Just getting back to your meeting your husband and getting married.  So you said that you – when you met him, one of the things that attracted you to him was that he had graduated summa cum laude from Tufts.  When did you get married?  Did you get married –?

FA:  We got married three and a half years after I just met him.  He, of course, was supporting his family.  I was, of course, supporting mine.  When we got married the first year, we couldn’t even afford to live together because his job took him to Washington, and he had to send money back to his mother with her ailing husband. At that time, I couldn’t give up my Massachusetts job – it was a civil service job – to be with him.  We did spend our honeymoon together.  I took a month off.  I did go down there and lived with him after we were married.  As a matter of fact, we were actually married, unknown to everybody, secretly married in April of 1940.  We were so ashamed to tell anybody that we were foolhardy enough to get married when my husband was earning just a pittance or almost nothing at all that we kept it quiet from everyone, even those closest to us.  We were finally married six months later by a very dear friend, Rabbi Alpert, David Alpert.  His wife was one of my closest friends.  She was an artist and somebody that I had met in the home, as a matter of fact.  She was an art teacher in the home and used to have me come to spend time with her family.  When she went on vacation, she would invite me to stay with her and her family.  We kept up that relationship all during my adult life.  When it came time to get married, I couldn’t think of anybody marrying me except her husband.

RR:  And where was he a rabbi?

FA:  He worked for the state.  He went to the state institutions as a rabbi.  He didn’t have a congregation around Boston.  When he first was ordained, he went to Texas, I think it was.  Louisiana.  I’ve forgotten the town.  But that was his first congregation.  But when he came back to Massachusetts, he worked for the state.  So we were married –

RR:  So the first time you were married, when you were secretly married, did you get married by a –?  You didn’t get married by a rabbi?

FA:  Oh, no.  As a matter of fact, we went up to the western part of the state.  I think we went into Vermont.  Yes.  We went into Vermont.  I was a parole officer at the time, and he accompanied me on one of my trips up to the western part of the state.  We slipped into Vermont, and we were married by a Justice of the Peace.  And I named my first child Judith Verne Addelson.  And the Verne was after Vernon, Vermont.  But it was a time when – I think there were other secret marriages.  Girls who were working as schoolteachers couldn’t get married.

RR:  Oh, right.

FA:  And several of them – I know of at least one that was married secretly before she had her official marriage.  But I was finally married in the Southern House on Beacon Street, which is right, I think, at the corner of Marion Street and Beacon Street, which housed many parties and bar mitzvahs and marriages.

RR:  I’m not sure it’s there anymore.

FA:  Oh, I know it’s not there anymore.

RR:  Yeah.  There’s a big high rise there.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  So, where did you live then?

FA:  When we married, I moved one street over from Carroll Avenue.  I’ve forgotten the name of the street.  I think Carroll Avenue was the street I got an apartment.  I didn’t want to live in the same apartment that I had lived [in] with my mother because she had to take a room.  When I got married, I knew that my mother couldn’t live with me because of her idiosyncratic ways.  So, we got a room for my mother, and I got an apartment very near the old one.  I think the new one was Carroll Avenue, and the first one was the very next street.  I can’t remember the name.

RR:  And your mother was –?

FA:  My mother took a room.  And the three of us gave her five dollars a week.  Of course, we had to add to it every week.

RR:  She took a room near you.

FA:  Yeah.  It was in Brighton.  I remember something very odd that struck me that showed my mother’s personality.  When we lived on Radcliffe Road, we had neighbors, where there was an inter-marriage.  This young man had married a non-Jewish girl.  He wasn’t working, and she had a baby.  My mother would cook on Friday night, make an extra chicken, and bring it into her because they were practically starving.  My mother never told us that.  We only knew that her butcher bill was higher than it should have been.  And years later, after I had my own family, this young mother, who had a child not too different from one of my children, called me up for some other reason altogether and told me what a wonderful woman my mother was.  That when she had been not accepted by the Jewish community and her husband wasn’t working, and every Friday, my mother would bring in a chicken.  We were trying to teach my mother to live within her bounds.  She never told us that she brought any food into this young family.  I learned about it all together by coincidence.  

RR:  So, how was your mother –?  Your mother was –?  Your relationship with your mother –?

FA:  Well, I was sort of a teacher to her.  I had to tell her to do this and to do that.  She had her own ways, and they were not all together socially, politically correct.  Most of the difficulty was over finances because, at that time, my sister, I, and my brother all had our own little families.  We had to get by on what our husbands were earning.  And not one of us had very big, big jobs.  We had to give her the five dollars.  Then it became seven dollars.  And still, she couldn’t get by on it.  So, I was sort of a disciplinarian to her.  I loved her very much, and she was a loving, warm, dear, beautiful mother.  She was a beauty all during her life.  She had a certain dignity about her.  But she had no practical sense whatsoever.  

RR:  I just think it was ironic that you lived on Radcliffe Road, and then you end up –

FA:  I went to Radcliffe first.  But that was absolutely no plan of mine.  Someone told us about this lovely apartment there.  It’s a little bit off of the main thoroughfare.  It was a private street, I remember. But there was one thing about that place that I feel very badly about.  That is when we got our house together, we had an old trunk of my parents.  We put everything in it from the early days that we weren’t using.  That trunk was in the doorway of the first apartment we got.  If a boyfriend would come to visit, the first thing you’d see was this old trunk.  So when we finally got to Radcliffe Road, we said, “This can’t go on.”   We put the trunk in the basement.  In the trunk was my mother’s wedding gown, in the first place, all my notes from Radcliffe, which were very precious to me, but most precious of all were the letters that Lillian Strauss had written to me during my last years of high school and all during the years at Radcliffe that were easily publishable.  They were so uplifting and so philosophical.  My letters to her were certainly not in the same category.  And they were all in that trunk.  There was also an Indian costume that I had printed on it different designs and embroideries, and that showed my accomplishments as a Campfire Girl.  But it was those letters that were just so precious to me, and that kept me going during all those years.  I realized they were of literary value.  Anyhow, they were all in the trunk, and the trunk disappeared when we came to move.  We never could find that trunk.  So somebody just threw the letters away, I’m sure.  There were little things from my parents’ household.

RR:  You mean it was down in the basement, and then when you went to find it, it was gone.

FA:  It was gone, yeah.

RR:  Were there other people living in the house?

FA:  Oh yeah.  It was an apartment house.

RR:  Oh, I see.  Okay.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Yeah.

FA:  There’s only one thing I have from my mother’s home, and that’s a painted dish that she probably bought out of her food money.  A lovely painted dish that one of my aunts kept in her house.  But there were many lovely little things that – so, that part of my life went with –

RR:  What a loss.  That’s a real loss.

FA:  Yeah.  So then, as I say, my mother was always a concern for me.  Well, I got married.  I continued to be a parole officer until I got pregnant.  Then I thought I would stay home and take care of my child.

RR:  And your husband?  What was your husband doing?

FA:  Oh, my husband, by that time, he got into civil service.  He went up in the ranks, and he went to the top and got a good salary near the end.

RR:  What was he doing?

FA:  I always have difficulty explaining.  He went through the personnel department and then into the fiduciary department.  He was in charge of spaces at the last job.  He was at naval research for a while.  His last job was out in Natick, Natick Headquarters for Research and Development.  It’s a great big project on a lake.  It’s a central government activity.  His job was being in charge of placement.  So, many places in each department.  We have pictures of him with the governor and with other dignitaries and generals in the Army.  I suppose you’d call him an engineer, an industrial engineer, or something like that.

RR:  So this was a U S government job.

FA:  Yeah.  It was a very important job at the end.  He never got over his Depression impressions.  We lived very frugally.  We bought our own home, of course.  But he never spent unwisely.  And sometimes, it was too frugal.

RR:  So then you first lived in an apartment in Brighton near your mother.  Then you bought a house.

FA:  Yeah.  Then we bought a house in Brookline right in the heart, right near the Devotion School, 3 Gibbs Street.  But the important thing was that when I had my first child, and Judy was just months old, very, very young, I had been a parole officer, and I took a leave of absence, and they called me back.  I didn’t want to leave her.  It was the time when nobody left a small baby.  But my mother-in-law came to live with us.  No.  At that time, she lived nearby, and she was a widow.  Her son was in the Army.  The family with whom she was living needed the room that she was living in because their son was coming back.  So, she had to come and live with me.

RR:  Your daughter was born in 1942.

FA:  That’s right.  She came completely unexpected to me.  My husband never talked about her coming to live with us.  First, she came and helped me with the baby.  And then, before I knew it, she had to give up her room where she was living nearby.  She came and lived with us.  So, I went back to work with the understanding that I would work only a few hours a day and come back whenever the baby needed me.  But before long, it was a full day.  It was a terrible wrench for me.  It was not being done at that time.  

RR:  Did you have a lot of feelings then about it?

FA:  I did.  But my husband needed a partner.  He was at the very beginning of his career.  He had to take care of his mother anyhow.  So she came, and we lived in crowded quarters at first.  She lived with me for twelve years.

RR:  You lived in crowded quarters on Gibbs Street.

FA:  No.  When we came to Gibbs Street, it was with the understanding that we would divide up.  It was a two-family house with a cement wall in between.  We bought the house and even had an architect work out plans so that my mother-in-law and her son, who just came back from the Army, would live on one side and we would live on the other.  We bought two refrigerators and two of many things.  When we came time to get the contractors to work on –

RR:  Dividing it?

FA:  – dividing it up, really, the town of Brookline said that the cement wall is two inches too small to make two separate apartments.  So, my mother-in-law had to move into our side of the home.  When her son came back from the Army, he had to come in with us.  So, for twelve years, I lived with my mother-in-law and about five years or six years, [with] her son.  So, it was hard.  But that was what had to be done.  My mother-in-law, God bless her, everybody would think that she would take the cooking over for me because I was working.  But she hated to cook.  She didn’t mind washing the dishes.  She didn’t mind cutting up the string beans.  But she did never cook a chicken or a roast or a meal, never.

RR:  And where was your mother during that time?

FA:  My mother was in a room.  And that was a source of –

RR:  It was hard.  It must have been.

FA:  It was very hard on my mother to see my mother-in-law – my mother-in-law was a rather submissive person.  But it was very – when she was there, I decided that I’d better go back to school and get a master’s degree and earn some real money.  My husband encouraged me in it.  So, I went back to school.  I went to Simmons School of Social Work and got a master’s degree.

RR:  When was that?

FA:  I went to Beth Israel in ’54.  I became a social worker in 1954 at Beth Israel, and I was there for seventeen years.

RR:  So you say in your questionnaire that you graduated from Simmons in ’54?

FA:  I think it was ’54.

RR:  So, how many years were you going to school then?

FA:  Oh, I went to school over a period of about three years.  I spread it out three or four years.

RR:  And in the meantime, you also had your son then, right?

FA:  Oh, yes, my son died when he was twenty-five.

RR:  But your son was born in 1945?

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  So there were two children at home.

FA:  Oh, I stayed home with my mother-in-law until the children went to school.  Yeah.  When they were in about the seventh and fourth grades, seventh and fifth grades, I decided to go back to Simmons.  Oh, I was with the two children.  Another thing I did when I was at home with the two children and my mother-in-law – there was a Jewish Community Center, I think, around 341 Harvard Street.  So, I volunteered my services there because I wanted my children to have some social contact with other children.  During the summer, I was a counselor.  They went to their group.

RR:  You were a counselor in a summer camp?

FA:  Yeah, in a summer camp.

RR:  Was it a day camp there?

FA:  It was a day camp, yeah.  I would go every day.  The children would go to their classes, and I would take other classes.  I remember I taught puppetry.  We made puppets, and we played with them.  It was all volunteer.  They gave me a stipend at the end of the summer, I remember, but I didn’t know I was going to get it.  So that was another contact with the Jewish Agency.  That was the very beginning of the Jewish Community Center on Harvard Street.  

RR:  So that Jewish Community Center lasted from –?  Was it after the war until –?

FA:  Oh, wait.  I moved in 1950.  I moved from the Brighton section, from Carroll Avenue to 3 Gibbs Street.

RR:  So, it was 1950.

FA:  So, it was during the ’50s that I went to the Jewish community center with my children.

RR:  Your mother-in-law moved in with you in 1950, then when you moved to Gibbs Street.

FA:  Yes.  She was intending to have her own place, or she was hoping. But it didn’t work out.  She was a very dependent woman.   She was perfectly happy to be with me and my children.  Of course, once I decided to go back to school, it was important for her to be there when the kids got out of school and all.

RR:  So your children went to Devotion School, and then they –

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  And you stayed living on Gibbs Street until when?

FA:  For ten years.  Then I went to Newton.

RR:  Then you moved to Newton.

FA:  Yeah.  When we went to Newton, she wanted to come with us, but she had her son.  We certainly couldn’t – well, it was a one-family house anyhow.  So that after living with her for twelve years – in the summertime, we would go up to a lake in the White Mountains.  We took her with us every year.  She was part of our household.  So then came a time when, as I say, when we knew we had to get out of Gibbs Street.

RR:  Why was that because it was too crowded, or it was getting too –?

FA:  Yes.  It wasn’t a good house.  It was too crowded for – it was on three floors.  My washing machine was in the basement.  At any rate, it was a very poor arrangement.  It left its mark, I think, on – well, it had to.  It had good points.  The children knew and felt security that a grandmother was there.  It got me out of the house.  My first love would have been to have stayed with my children, certainly when my daughter was very young.  But I was only out of the house until my second child came, and then I knew I would stay home.  And then, when they got into mid-school, mid-grammar school, my husband and I decided that I had to ought a degree if I’m going to work in social work.

RR:  So, your son was fifteen then when you moved to Newton.  Is that right?

FA:  That’s right.  He was just going into high school.  And my daughter finished up at Brookline High.  And he went to –

RR:  Newton?

FA:  Newton, yeah.

RR:  Newton North?  Where did you live in Newton?

FA:  We lived at 36 Irving Street, right near Temple Emanuel on a little street that goes right into the center door of Temple Emanuel on Ward  Street.  It was then that we joined Temple Israel.

RR:  Even though you lived very close to Temple Emanuel.

FA:  Yeah.  It was a little too Orthodox for us.  We started out by sending my son to Hebrew school on Harvard Street.

RR:  KI [Kehillath Israel]?

FA:  He did KI.  He started there.  Once my husband was walking along with him.  And he was with a friend of – my son had a friend with him.  The kid said to my son, “How come you’re not coming to KI anymore?”  And my son answered, “Well, my parents made me Reformed.”  So, we went to Temple Israel.

RR:  So that was actually when you were still in Brookline that you joined –

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  – Temple Israel.

FA:  We were on Gibbs Street.  So, then we came to Newton.  We were ten years on 3 Gibbs Street and thirty years in Newton.  

RR:  Until 1990.

FA:  We stayed there, yeah, until 1990 when my husband died.  When he died, I had to leave.  I knew I couldn’t live in the house.  It was one of these great big old – not great big.  But it was an old wooden frame house and needed a lot of repairing.  So, I hired some painters to paint it, spruce it up, and fix it up.  One of them had no – they were students, music students at Boston University.  One had no place to live.  He said he would help me fix it up if he could move in.  So, he did.  A Chinese music student moved in.  He helped me wrap things up and clean out the garage, clean out the basement, and repair some of the rooms.  The house looked very nice.  Now, I go by there, and it’s all spruced up.  We became friends.  

As a matter of fact, I wrote a story about my contact with him.  I was just looking at it the other day.  Somebody asked me about some of the publications that I’ve done.

RR:  Yeah.  Well, just to wrap up about your house.  Did this Chinese student then buy the house from you?

FA:  Oh, no, no.  He was as poor as a church mouse.  He couldn’t even pay his rent.  

RR:  He helped you.

FA:  He helped me repair a lot of things.  Helped me move and packed me and got me in here.  We’ve been in touch ever since.

RR:  So, could you talk a little bit about what are your publications?  What have you written?

FA:  Oh, I haven’t written very much.  I was only paid for one thing.  I just looked it up the other day, and I’ll show it to you.  The relationship between George Eliot and Judaism.  She played a part in publicizing the idea that Palestine should become a national homeland for the Jews in the –

RR:  Daniel Deronda.

FA:  In Daniel Deronda.  I was so impressed with reading that story when I was in the home in one of those great big old books that I never forgot the impression it left on me.  Then, when I – was I retired?  Yeah.  I think it was after I retired that I did a little research, and I put it into some form and sent it off.  It was published, and I got paid for it.

RR:  Where was it published?

FA:  The Jewish Frontier.  I spoke on the subject of George Eliot in Judaism to several Hadassah groups.  Not Hadassah, yeah.  One was Hadassah.  And then, I went to visit my sister in Florida.  There was a group there that was studying Jewish subjects.  I gave a speech there and a few places.  The other things I’ve published?  I’ve published our trips to Europe.  My husband and I went to Europe at least five times.  One time, I was particularly impressed with an independent tour I took.  I was able to publish our independent tour of southern France.  It got on the Boston Sunday Globe in the travel section, about three pages.  It was quite a detailed report.

RR:  When was that?

FA:  That was about – oh, God.  Who can remember all these dates?  It must have been about ‘70.  No.  My son died in ’70.  It was our anniversary, I think, when we took our first – it was some anniversary, but it wasn’t so long ago.  I can’t remember whether it was after he died or not.  And then I’ve sent in things, and they’ve been published.  But I’ve never been paid for any of it.

RR:  You mean sent in things to the Globe and other places?

FA:  Yeah.  And I am going – I’ve been accepted for publication on a story that I wrote fairly recently called “Parallels.”  In fact, someone just asked me to look at it, and I took it out.  So I have it really right handy if you want to see it.

RR:  Yes, yes.  Do you have a list of your publications?

FA:  I think I do have a list somewhere.  Yeah.  As a matter of fact, I just took some stuff out.  I was looking for it yesterday.  It’s very hard for me to find anything because I can’t see.  My filing is just atrocious.  Even when I could see, I never put things in the right place because my memory was so poor I would use different filing terms and forget which ones I used.

RR:  So, what is wrong with your eyes now?

FA:  Oh, I have macular degeneration very bad.  That’s why I was knocked down.  It was because although I was on a safety zone and I had my stick out – if I could see, I would have seen that she was coming at me.  But I couldn’t see, so I just –

RR:  So when did this accident happen?

FA:  It happened April 24 of –

RR:  1997.

FA:  Yeah.  Two days after I got – two or three days after I got back from Florida.  I go to Florida to be near my sister every year since my husband died.  We often joke about it.  But we have no sibling rivalry because we yearned so to be together during our early years that it’s just a joy every time my brother, my sister, and I would get together.

RR:  So you go down to Sarasota, then?

FA:  Well, she’s in a place called Wynmoor.

RR:  Oh, she’s in Wynmoor?

FA:  Yeah.  Do you know Wynmoor?

RR:  Yeah.  My aunt is there.

FA:  Oh, really.  And she lives there all year round.  And she has a ninety-two-year-old husband.

RR:  Which part of Wynmoor is she in?

FA:  She’s in Antigua Terrace.  She’s coming up here next week.  Her daughter, who lives in Montpelier, Vermont, is going to be here, too.  So the three of us will be together, and that will be very nice.  

RR:  So, her daughter lives in Montpelier?

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  She works ¬–?

FA:  She works at the Art Council in Vermont, travels over the state bringing education and all that inspiration to different communities there.  Now, where were we?

RR:  I was going to ask you if you wanted to talk at all about your son and his suicide.

FA:  Well, I don’t think that’s anything – he was depressed.

RR:  Was he always depressed?

FA:  No, no.  It happened in his last years of college.  I don’t think I 

want to talk about it for this purpose.

RR:  Sure.  No.  That’s fine.

FA:  For my family, it would be different.  But it’s something that one never, never, never gets over.  It’s a heartache.  He was a wonderful, wonderful boy, very, very sensitive.  He was very, very like me in many ways in our standards and values.  It’s just one of those things we have to accept.  

RR:  He was at college at UMass Amherst?

FA:  Yes.  He was at U of Mass Amherst when it happened –when he first got sick, his first episode of depression.  So, I really don’t want to talk about it.   It’s too painful.

RR:  No, no.  That’s okay.  So, can I ask you just a little bit about why you decided to join Temple Israel when you did?

FA:  Well, it was Reformed.  We knew that my daughter wasn’t interested in learning Hebrew.  She did go to Sunday school at Temple Israel.  We just didn’t want the Orthodox or the Conservative stamp on our lives.  Friends were going there.  The Needelmans were very close friends of ours.  Joan Needleman is extremely ill right now.  I think she joined first and urged us to join, too.  I found it very satisfying.  I led a very busy life, you know, tending to my own family, my mother, and my job.  Once I got out of Simmons School of Social Work, I worked at a family agency for a little while.  And then I worked at Beth Israel Social Service Department for, as I say, almost eighteen years.  Now you were asking me about – and while I was at Beth Israel, I did publish something.  It was during the early days when abortion became acceptable.  I was in the Obstetrical/Gynecological clinic at the social worker station there.  I met many girls, many women who wanted abortions but couldn’t – the hospital couldn’t accommodate so many.  So, I was on the dividing line and had to direct or guide people that we couldn’t accommodate to other sources.  That’s a whole story in itself.  I don’t think I can talk anymore.  We’ve been talking a long time, haven’t we?

RR:  Yeah.  It’s about two hours.

FA:  I think that’s –

RR:  Do you want to just finish this side of the tape?

FA:  Yeah.  Well, what more can I tell you?  

RR:  You said you wrote a story about your work – it was abortion.

FA:  It wasn’t a story.  It was factual material that was sent to the – if you’ll turn off the tape.  I’ve got it right here.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  Okay.  Frances, you’ve had a number of publications in your life.  One is premier work at Beth Israel Hospital at a time when abortion was not acceptable and was not legal, really.  It’s in the American Journal of Ortho-Psychiatry, October 1973.  It’s called “The Induced Abortion.” 

 

FA:  Right.  But the other one comes first.

RR:  “Source of Guilt or Growth.”  And also a publication in the Jewish Frontier –

FA:  No, no.  You want to put the two abortion things together.

RR:  Oh, okay.  They look like they’re the same.

FA:  No, no, dear.  

RR:  They look like they’re the same issue.

FA:  Oh, they are?

RR:  Yeah.

FA:  See, I don’t even have the second one.

RR:  So you wrote two articles.

FA:  Yes.  One was in Ortho-Psychiatry, and the other was in the Journal – they’re both national journals.  The other was the National Journal of Gynecology and –

RR:  Obstetrics.

FA:  Obstetrics and Gynecology.  There were two years between them.  So, those are both the same?

RR:  Those are the same.

FA:  Oh, dear.  I’m glad you told me.  I’ve got to get – I think my daughter has the Jewish Frontier.

RR:  Let me see what else we have here.  One was published in Jewish Frontier called “The First Zionist Novel,” Frances Addelson – Frances P. Addelson looks at Daniel Deronda.  I don’t see a date for this.  But it’s fairly recent because it has an article also about – oh, it’s August 1987.  Jewish Frontier.  And then also a poem that was published in the Literary Supplement of Harvard Learning and Retirement.

FA:  Where I’ve been going for about ten years.

RR:  And what is that?  That’s kind of a Harvard learning –

FA:  For retired people.

RR:  – courses?  Okay.

FA:  It’s a peer learning project where people get together in small groups and learn, focus, on some aspect of – [END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A] Well, I thought that you wanted me to describe the kind of life I’m leading as a senior and as a survivor at eighty-eight, I think I would need to get my wits together a little bit more.  My husband died in 1990, and I’ve led an altogether different kind of life since then.  I don’t think I’m up to talking about it after two hours of talking, talking, talking.  Okay.

RR:  Fine.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

RR:  This is Friday, November 14, 1997.  Rochelle Ruthchild is interviewing Frances Addelson.  This is part two of the interview.  We’re starting by going through some pictures that Frances had put together for her family history.  The first picture we’re looking at is a picture of Frances and her family, 1955, Lake Memphremagog.

FA:  Lake Memphremagog.

RR:  Here.  Why don’t you say it?

FA:  We’re on Lake Memphremagog, which is right between Vermont, I think, and Canada.  We’re on a wonderful outing and perched on a rock posing for a very nice young couple that we adopted as we went along in our explorations.

RR:  Could you say who’s in the picture?

FA:  Well, there’s my son and daughter, and my husband and I with our favorite dog who lived with us for about fifteen years.  Every summer, we would go up to the White Mountains because my husband and I had hay fever, or that was our excuse.  We spent our vacation up there and went on into Canada, visiting other places.  We lived on a lake called Holiday Acres.  It was a group of families that got together every summer.

RR:  Okay.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

FA:  That really should go in chronological order.  This is an early picture.  Now, I thought you probably didn’t want any wedding pictures or bar mitzvahs because you get so many of those.  You want things that are a little varied, don’t you?

RR:  Yeah.  But if you have some interesting wedding or bar mitzvah pictures, that’s fine.

FA:  They’re not any different from – this is an early picture of my family before my father died.  Is it on?

RR:  Yes.

FA:  And before my father died and our home was disrupted.  It’s a picture of my brother age about four, me about three, and my parents.  I was very close to my father.  Although he died early, he was a source of inspiration to me all my life as far as learning and education were concerned.

RR:  And there you are, sitting on his knee.

FA:  Yes.  Okay.  This is a picture that was taken about 1927 at Pine Grove Camp in Billerica.  I think I mentioned it before.  I was a counselor, and my sister was visiting one day when we had a masquerade party.  We posed as cowboy and Indian.

RR:  You’re the cowboy, and your sister’s the Indian.

FA:  Yeah.  Pine Grove Camp was a fun camp.  It was a source of earning my expenses each summer for the following winter when I was at college.  I was a counselor there for four years.

RR:  From what years?

FA:  Oh, from 1926 to 1930.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  Well, I thought I’d give you a chance to choose.

RR:  Why don’t you –?  Let’s just go through all of them, and we can –

FA:  All of them.

RR:  I mean the ones that you’ve picked out already.

FA:  This is a picture of my family when we were reunited.  My sister and I and brother were working people after being separated for many years.  There in the middle is my mother that kept house for us while she was well.  We always took family pictures, I think, because our home had been disrupted for five years before.  It was very painful during that time.  And family life meant a great deal to us.  This was taken about 19 – what does that say?

RR:  1932.  You’re all very dressed up, and the women with high heels.

FA:  The fashion of the day.

RR:  Right.

FA:  Dressed in the fashion of the day.  Now, can you read what it says?

RR:  This one says, “John Kagel standing next to my cousin, David Pass, reading prayers before lighting Hanukah candles.  Looking on are Janet Kagel, Jackie Pass, Michael Kemler, Judy Addelson, with Uncle Sam ready to pass out the Hanukah gelt.”

FA:  This picture was taken during a Kin Club celebration.  We had a cousins club that we called Kin Club.  We would meet every other month at each other’s homes.  That kept the cousins in the family together for, oh, maybe about ten years.  When the children grew older, they disbursed.  I’m sorry to say it was never resurrected again.  But the children did enjoy celebrating the holidays.  Here we have the Hanukah party.  Now, shall I talk about it now?

RR:  Yeah.  First of all, this is a book entitled The Home for Jewish Children: 1919-1925.  It’s a book of pictures of the home, including pictures of groups and pictures of Frances doing various activities.  One picture in particular –

FA:  Is my favorite is of the Campfire Girls perched on the top of Mount Winn in New Hampshire.  We lived in tents, and we observed all the Campfire Girls’ rules.  This is a picture of them sitting in a circle, singing their songs, and reciting the poem “Hiawatha.”  Each one of us would take a stanza, and we would recite the poem from beginning to end as we sat in a circle with the fire in the center.

RR:  And the inscription underneath is “Please keep watch, Mammy Moon.”

FA:  That was one of the songs that we sang.

RR:  It’s a great picture.

FA:  Yeah.  We loved going on these trips.  While we were in the home, we really had many interesting excursions.  This was an annual one.  This setting, I believe, or this camp was the foundation of Emoh, which is home spelled backward, H-O-M-E, E-M-O-H, and that became a camp for Jewish children who were not in the home.  It simply followed some of the activities and spirit that our camp started.

RR:  So, all of the girls in this picture were from the home.

FA:  That’s right.  It was a wonderful experience for city children to go up into the country.  At that time and at that place, it was really quite an isolated place, and we lived in the outdoors.  I remember one wonderful experience we had standing on the top of this mountain that was probably just a big hill and seeing the rain come from another mountain far away, a sheet of rain just approaching us.  That was one of the first natural phenomena I ever saw, and I was so impressed with it.  Other pictures, other pictures are – this is the art class of little children.  I and an assistant were instructing them.

RR:  So, how old were you in that picture?

FA:  I think I must have been about fifteen.  Not that I was an artist by any manner of means, but the art teacher, Miss Greenberg, who later became Rabbi David Alpert’s wife, was very fond of me.  She let me take her place once when she couldn’t attend the class.  By the way, Mrs. Alpert became a lifelong friend, and I spent many, many happy hours with her, going to concerts, living with her family during vacation periods, and really becoming a part of her family.

RR:  And what year is that about?

FA:  This picture – if I was fifteen and I was born in ‘09, I suppose –

RR:  1924.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  You want me to go through – you don’t want all of them.

RR:  Whatever ones you think are particularly –

FA:  Yes.  There are some that – oh, there was a play put on by some very fine volunteers.  They used the children as the actors and actresses.  As a matter of fact, one play was called “Joseph and his Brethren.”  We put it on at the Franklin Park theater right opposite Franklin Park.  It’s no longer extant, of course.  My brother was Joseph.  He’s here somewhere.  I was one of the sheaves in Joseph’s dream.

RR:  Here’s Joseph right here.

FA:  Yeah.  That’s my brother.  I’m one of a group of girls who bowed down to him in his dream and sang some song, admiring him.

RR:  Do you know if anybody’s written a history of the Jewish Home?

FA:  I don’t know.  I haven’t heard of it.  This is the print class at the – in one of the portables in the yard at the Jewish Home.  These the boys who were learning to be printers.  We lived in tents during the time that we went on these camp excursions.  I can’t see these little pictures.

RR:  There’s pictures on the beach.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Lil Drucker.

FA:  Lillian Drucker was the daughter of Saul Drucker, who was the director of the Home for Jewish Children.  When I see these children in a boat, it reminds me that one day, one of the girls swam out too far into the water.  My brother, who was a very good swimmer, swam out and saved her.  So, he became the hero more than the day.  He was also a good athlete, and there’s a lovely picture of him – he was a very handsome young man – as head of the basketball.

RR:  Oh, okay.  There it is.  Yeah.  Yeah.

FA:  Home for Jewish Children on their –

RR:  Basketball team.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  And let’s see.  Right.  He was the captain of the team.  Is that him?  He was pretty tall.

FA:  Well, he’s the handsomest one there, I think.  This is he.

RR:  Okay.  Yeah, right, there he is.  You’re right.

FA:  These are some of the counselors sitting around the fire.  And here we are outside our tent.  

RR:  Camping is the life is the – it says camp at Sharon, 1924, camping is the life.

FA:  Well, that was a different camp from the one I described up at the top of the hill.  I think this is a group of us after we got to the –

RR:  It’s New Hampshire, Mt. Winn.

FA:  Yeah.  Mt. Winn is the one that I was so fond of where we sat around the campfire.  And let’s see who it says here.  These are first loves at the home.  My brother told me that a lot of children paired off.  At least one that I know of got married.  But in my youth, I never established a relationship with any boys.

RR:  There’s Hy Sugarman and Lil Gottlieb.  Franklin Park, a picture in Franklin Park.

FA:  Yeah.  Franklin Park played a big part in our lives.  We knew the bird sanctuary there.  We knew the three elephants, Molly, and her children.  We visited there very often.  Of course, we tobogganed down the golf course in the wintertime, and that was a great experience.  This was a picture of the Boy Scouts after one of their trips.  My brother is one of them.

RR:  With their sleeping rolls wrapped around.

FA:  So, you see, we had lots of fun while we were at the Home.  This is a picture of my brother and me when we both graduated high school.  That was the Oliver Wendell Holmes High School.  There you see a group of boys with baseball – there’s my brother as the –

RR:  As Joseph.

FA:  As Joseph.  

RR:  Very handsome.

FA:  Yeah.  He was.

RR:  And who is this man over there?

FA:  He was one of the volunteers.  He might have been a paid worker.  His name, I think, was Gluck.

RR:  And you don’t have any pictures of –?  You said that you had correspondence with Lillian Strauss.

FA:  Oh I had a –

RR:  You don’t have any pictures of her then.

FA:  I do have some pictures of her somewhere but not in this book because she only stayed at the home a short while.  But she did write to me all during my college career and, unfortunately, I have lost –

RR:  But you say she was the one who was most influential in having you apply to Radcliffe.

FA:  Not only apply.  She paid my first year’s tuition out of her salary as a social worker.  Of course, that was repaid immediately after I graduated.  I do have pictures of her that she sent me when she established herself in New York City as – she became the leader or the director of a children’s community center.  She sent me pictures.  But I can’t put my fingers on them because it’s difficult for me to see.  Here’s a picture, I think, of graduation from high school.  And this is a –

RR:  Campfire Girls.

FA:  Right outside the home.  You can see part of the home.  But Austin Farm played a big part in – that later became the state hospital.

RR:  Oh, that’s where the State Hospital is.

FA:  Yeah.  But it was originally a farm, and we used to roam around on the grounds there.

RR:  Why does it say, “beginning of our stomach aches?”

FA:  Because we used to get green apples from the –

RR:  Trees.

FA:  Yeah. 

RR:  There’s one other picture in the back, a big picture.  

FA:  There’s sort of printing.  So you see, they were very anxious to have children trained in some vocation before they left the home.  I don’t know how many of them went into printing or into some of the other things.  But they tried awfully hard.  I can’t express enough gratitude to the Jewish community for being there and helping my brother and me to have a safe and really forward-looking experience in spite of the personal sadness that breaking up a home entails for those five years.  They taught us self-reliance, self-discipline, and how to get along in the world.  We both made it.  I’m sure a lot is due to the fact that Jewish people have a feeling for others and stepped in when we needed it most.

RR:  You have a list of your publications here, which are quite impressive.

FA:  [inaudible] I added on some things that I didn’t want to forget.  I was one of the founding members of the Jewish Community Center on Harvard Street.  That’s where it all started in about – oh, I guess it must have been 1940-something.  I was active in that.  I wrote it down.  What does this one say?

RR:  Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement.

FA:  Oh, yeah.  I was a group leader for three semesters.  I did, I think, a very interesting group activity.  I called it “the spoken word”.  And we read aloud dramatically.  We prepared it a little bit but we read from text of poetry and plays and short stories in search of human relationships.  We would discuss the background of the play or whatever and read aloud parts of it, the dramatic parts, and then discuss the background, the times, and that sort of thing.  So, I thought that was a very important part of my retirement life.  And I can tell you about – is this the Jewish Community Center?

RR:  Oh, no.  But you also say you were a member of the New England Speakers’ Bureau of the Elderhostel.

FA:  Oh, yeah.  Yeah.  When Elderhostel first came into being, we joined about two years after its very beginning when it was a very small organization.  To this day, they have no advertisements.  But we do have a speaker’s bureau.  We went to so many Elderhostels, my husband and I, that they asked us to join.  We would go around to churches and social organizations and tell them about our experiences and what Elderhostel has to offer.  So, to this day, we meet annually in some lovely spot in New England.  I’m really one of the charter members.

RR:  Great.  Do you still do speaking or –?

FA:  Well, ever since I lost my sight, I haven’t done very much.  I go more as an honorary member.  Now what’s that –?

RR:  Parent Teachers Association.

FA:  Oh, yeah.

RR:  At the Devotion School.

FA:  Yeah.  My daughter said to me the other day, “You didn’t do any volunteer work.”  I began to think back, and I looked up some of the clippings that I kept from newspapers.  Sure enough, I was one of the founding members.  What am I talking about now?

RR:  The Parent Teachers Association.

FA:  Oh, the Parent Teachers Association.  No.  I was very active in the Parent Teachers Association at the Devotion School.  Does it say what year?

RR:  It doesn’t say what year.  But do you want to add that in?

FA:  Well, my children were about in the fourth and seventh grades.  I was on the publicity and the education committee.  I would bring back material that I was handling – that I was learning at Beth Israel Hospital as a social worker.  Some of the studies that were being lectured about at Beth Israel, I would bring back the findings to the PTA meetings, and the parents were always very grateful to know what the latest studies showed.  I was a conduit between my job and my children’s school.  I thought that was very rewarding.

RR:  So, that was probably in the ’50s.

FA:  Yes.  That was in the fifties, yeah, because I moved away in 1960.

RR:  So, it’s very impressive.  You could have a little resume here.

FA:  What do you mean by resume?

RR:  Like a summary of all your activities.

FA:  Well, that’s why I put them down so that I would be reminded to talk about it.

RR:  Okay.  You want this off for a few minutes?

FA:  Yeah.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  Okay.  This is great.  It’s fine to go chronologically haywire.

FA:  All right.  Now I wanted to show you this.  When my mother came to this country – what have I got down here?  She was on a boat.  And this was what they gave her on the boat.  She told me that she put her belongings in here.

RR:  Wow.

FA:  And put it around her back, and she dragged it on the floor.  She pointed out to me once that there’s a hole here.  That was because it was being dragged on the floor.

RR:  Wow.

FA:  But this tells the boat that she was on.  

RR:  Wow.  That’s amazing.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Amsterdam, New Jersey.  Is that what it says?

FA:  Is that what it says?

RR:  New York, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, New York.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Wow.  That’s incredible.  This is a scarf?

FA:  Yeah.  But it was supposed to hold her belongings.  She didn’t bring very much, apparently.

RR:  Right.

FA:  But that’s what she told me.

RR:  Right.  

FA:  She was about twelve or thirteen at the time, so they didn’t give her too much to carry.

RR:  Right.  It’s not like our big luggage.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  So this is a scarf.  It says Holland American Line on it.  

FA:  I think it –

RR:  Rotterdam, Amsterdam, New York.

FA:  Is that the right way?

RR:  Royal Dutch Mail Steamer.  And this was brought from Europe.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Amazing.

FA:  No, no, this was brought – the boat gave her this.

RR:  Yeah, yeah.  The boat gave her this, but in Europe.

FA:  Yeah.  And as the tourist companies now give you a little bag.

RR:  Right.  Plastic bag or something.  Yeah.

FA:  This is what they gave her.

RR:  Amazing.

FA:  You can smell the age on it.

RR:  Wonderful that you still have it.

FA:  Another old thing that I have that I think is precious, and you can have this if you want, and that is a card –

RR:  This is the card.  Right.

FA:  Yeah.  This is the card.  My grandfather brought two of his children from Russia to America, where his oldest three daughters were already living and had established themselves.  So he came in 19 – if you can tell –

RR:  Yeah.  Let me see.  This is a postcard that is written in Yiddish in the back.  Let’s see if I can find the date.  It’s 1906.

FA:  Yes.  He brought two more of his younger children to these sisters.  He stayed with them for about a year.  His wife back in Russia had refused to come with him.  And he tells in this Yiddish story in his card – oh, he finally decides to go back to his wife.  But apparently, he was a little conflicted about whether he should stay on with his children in America or return to his wife, hoping that somehow or other, she would get here through the efforts of neighbors or something.  In this card that he writes when he arrives at the end of his voyage on this boat –

RR:  Let’s see.  The boat is the Nordau.

FA:  With a picture of the Kaiser.

RR:  Right.  Kaiser Wilhelm and Crown – it’s Nordau Lloyd – Crown Prince Wilhelm.  It’s written in this beautiful Yiddish script.  

FA:  It was written after he decided to leave America.  As he was on the boat, or after he soon got off the boat, he wrote back to his children and said that his place was beside his wife, and he hoped he could convince her to come with him to America sometime.  But he did spend a year with his three older daughters, who were already here and settled.  As a matter of fact, they even set him up in a little business of laces and yard goods in East Boston.  He and my mother ran the store.  But neither of them were businesslike people, and I think it just petered out, or my mother got married, and that was the end of that venture.

RR:  Now I don’t remember then what happened to your grandfather.  He went back and –?

FA:  He went back to his wife.  They had two more children.  Our family was in touch with him and his family, of course, for many years.  I remember sending clothes and money – not I, but the older people in the family – until Hitler took over, and after the Holocaust, we never heard from them again.  Oh, before the Holocaust, my aunt and uncle, my Uncle Sam Sugarman and his wife, Mae, my mother’s sister, went back and did see them.  That was in ’33, I think.  And in ’33, they went back to Rusia, Poland, and saw them and said that the living conditions were just terrible there.  By that time, my grandfather and grandmother had already had these two more children who were grown, and they had their children.  As I say, after the Hitler epic, we never heard from them again.

RR:  Do you know where they were and what –?

FA:  Yeah.  They were in Calvary.

RR:  Oh, Calvary, right.

FA:  Does that –?

RR:  No.  I’d have to look it up on a map.

FA:  Well, that’s where they always lived, and I presume that they were still there.  So that is a precious – and this is a picture of it.

RR:  Of the address, yeah.  It’s addressed to Mr. H. Jaffe, 322 Blue Hill Avenue, Roxbury, Boston, Mass.  It has a US stamp on it.  So, I don’t know why it would have – so, it was actually – it must have been –

FA:  On the boat that they wrote.

RR:  Yeah.

FA:  I remember that address.  It was right on Blue Hill Avenue, about a quarter of a mile down from Grove Hall and across the street from the Shawmut Theatre.  It had a large backyard with a grapevine summerhouse.  As children, we spent a lot of time playing in the back there.  My Aunt Jaffe was quite a dressmaker.  Part of her home was given over to her business.  She became quite well known, making original clothes for wealthy women.  I remember, as children, we were paid to pick up pins from the floor.  We would get, probably a penny for picking up ten pins or something like that.  But she was extraordinary, and she was the first one of our – my mother’s family to come to this country.  She brought over all of her sisters and brothers, except the two that were born after my grandfather went back.

RR:  So your grandfather actually went back before World War I, is that right?

FA:  Yes.  Oh, yes, he must have, of course, because he –

RR:  Oh, right.  Actually, this is 1906.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Okay.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

FA:  This is an interesting picture of my mother and her younger sister.  And does it give the date there?

RR:  Around 1910.

FA:  Yeah.  It shows the clothing and the style of the day.  Since their older sister was a couturier, they were dressed in just the right fashion, I’m sure.  

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  Okay.

FA:  As I said, this is a picture of my mother and her younger sister, Rose, who later was married to Myer Sugarman of the Sugarman Brothers’ paper business.  And they were very, very close.  All those sisters were very close all their lives.

RR:  Do if when the Sugarmans went to Poland they took any pictures?

FA:  They did, but my uncle wasn’t very mechanical, and they didn’t come out very good.  I’ve lost sight of them.  He said that the conditions were terrible.  I remember him telling us that they lived in dire poverty.  They took all their clothes, even their personal clothes, and left them there as much as they could and came back in decent attire.  Then they sent them and gave them all the money that they had left after there so that they could get back home themselves.  But the whole town was in very bad shape.  This is a picture of my parents at the time of their marriage.  My mother was very beautiful, and my father was, as I say, he was an intellectual and a socialist.  There is an interesting picture of him in a group.  No.  What are these?

RR:  Those are –

FA:  [inaudible]

RR:  This says, “Friends of my parents unknown to me.”

RR:  Okay.

FA:  This is the picture I thought might be interesting.  This is a picture of my father and his group of insurance agents.  The background is the bandstand at Revere Beach.  I thought that was interesting from the point of view of – he sold, I think, what they called industrial insurance.  He sold these accounts, which were probably five cents a week for each child.  As a matter of fact, when we became of age, we each got about a couple of hundred dollars as a result of his starting an account for –

RR:  So, he’s right in the middle?

FA:  Yeah, that’s him.  Here’s another picture of the group.  I don’t know the background, but I thought that was so interesting.

RR:  Yes.  It’s a very good –

FA:  Revere Beach.  Does that mean anything to you?

RR:  Yeah, I know –

FA:  If you were Boston-born.  That’s another one of the group. This is a picture of the family in about 1933.  This is my aunt and uncle visiting their mother.  I guess the father had died by then.

RR:  Your aunt and uncle?  What are their names?

FA:  Sugarman.

RR:  Oh, okay, okay.

FA:  And this their two daughters.

RR:  Their two daughters.

FA:  Yes.  I don’t know who this is.  And this is, I guess, their children.  So that we got after the Sugarmans got back.

RR:  Oh, this is a picture from Europe?

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Oh, okay.

FA:  Yes.  But it was taken with my aunt and uncle at the time of their visit. 

RR:  So that must –

FA:  Does it say anything there?

RR:  Yeah.  It’s actually translated from the Yiddish.  “A remembrance for a dear sister, Esther.  Dear children from sisters and brother-in-law and mother.”  It’s from Gomel in Ukraine.  So, it must be that that two of the women here must be –

FA:  Two sisters.

RR:  Yeah, younger sisters.  Right.

FA:  Born after the others came to this country.

RR:  Right.  Sisters and brother-in-law and mother.  Yeah.  So, that’s your grandmother.

FA:  Yeah.  That’s the one that stubbornly refused to come to America.  They’re all gone.

RR:  So, everybody else in the picture except these two were living in the Soviet Union.

FA:  Gomel, yeah.

RR:  Yeah, or Poland.  I don’t know which was which at that point, but yeah.

FA:  Okay.  What does that say?

RR:  It says Jacob Pass about 1902, age twenty-six, New York City.  Very handsome.

FA:  Yeah.  He landed in New York City.  But he moved to Boston to be near my mother because he was courting her at the time.  You don’t want to go through all this.

RR:  Well, I mean, there’s some interesting stuff here.

FA:  Yeah.  If we see something.  What does that say?

RR:  It says, “My father’s brothers ask Etta to identify place of photo.”

FA:  Yeah, maybe you can.  Can you read--?  You know my father would get pictures.

RR:  Yeah.  I can read Russian.

FA:  Oh really?

RR:  Yeah.  This is in Russia.

FA:  My father would get pictures of – and would say to me, “This is my brother.”  This was taken in Warsaw.

RR:  In Odessa.

FA:  Oh, so it’s in Russia.

RR:  Yeah, yeah.

FA:  Does it say anything in back?

RR:  Yeah.  It says, “Photograph in Odessa. The photographer is Shapiro.”  And it says, “Bad weather doesn’t prevent picture taking.”  Well, this is in English.  “Jacob Pass’s brother and his friends.”  You don’t know what happened to your father’s brother either, right?

FA:  No.  No, I don’t.  But isn’t that fascinating?  They look like dudes, don’t they?

RR:  Yeah.  Wild and crazy, right?

FA:  Yeah.  I’m not even a hundred percent sure which is my father’s brother.

RR:  Well, it looks like he’s in the middle.  But, yes, it could be somebody –it could be –

FA:  They all look alike.

RR:  Right.  They do.

FA:  He told me this was his sister.

RR:  Okay.  I think it just—

FA:  Stuck together.

RR:  This is from Vitebsk, which is where Marc Chagall came from.  And it says, “(?) is the name of the photographer.”  It says it’s on the side of the Church of St. John.

FA:  This is his mother.  This must be his brother.  Could we tell which is his brother from that picture?

RR:  Yeah.  Well, no.  I mean, we can tell it’s not this person.  It probably is this person.  Looks the closest.  Let’s see.  Oh, and this is actually – this is in Warsaw.  This picture was taken in Warsaw.  (Yakobovich?).  (Hipaleit Yakobovich?) from Warsaw.  All very stylishly dressed.  And there’s another picture of the brother, also Warsaw.  So, maybe there were more than one brother.  There must be more than one.

FA:  No, no.  I think there’s only one.

RR:  There’s only one.  Okay.  Okay.

FA:  No, no.  There were two brothers.  That’s right.  But I think he told me one went to Paris.  But I don’t have a picture from Paris.

RR:  Let’s see.  No, now we can get a better handle on things.  Okay.  Then this is this person.  This is also from Odessa, and it’s another picture from Shapiro.  So it’s that person on the side.  Yeah.

FA:  I hope I remember.

RR:  I can write it down for you if you want.

FA:  Can you?

RR:  Yeah.

FA:  Write it on the back of this.  Can I give you a little tape to put on?

RR:  Oh, sure.  Yeah, we can do that at the end.  Are there more Russian pictures?  I’ll just go through all the Russian pictures for you.

FA:  Well, I have all these together.

RR:  Okay.  We’ll put these back.

FA:  I hope –

RR:  And here’s one more.  Okay.  Just get it in there.  Good.  So they were all over the Russian Empire, it looks like.

FA:  Now, this is that wonderful aunt of mine who came first with my mother.  That’s an interesting picture.

RR:  The seamstress, right?

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  And that was taken in New York.

FA:  Oh, yeah.  She worked in a factory there – my mother did, too – in sewing.  But she came to Boston and decided she would start a business of her own.  She was very successful.  She made a great deal of money.  So, this was in New York when they first arrived.

RR:  This is the sister who died in this flu epidemic.

FA:  In the flu right after my father died.

RR:  Right.  It was taken by Paley Brothers Studio in New York City.  And it says, “Bessie Cohen and Esther Cohen about 1900 in New York City, eighteen years old.”

FA:  Yeah.  This is my father as a very young man.  I wonder where that was taken.  It must have been when he first arrived.

RR:  Yeah.  That was in New York City.  Also Paley.  Maybe even they did it at the same time for all we know.  It says on the back, “Jacob Pass, newly arrived New York City.”  Let’s see.  About nineteen.

FA:  Yeah.  I think I showed you this.  This is my mother and sister.

RR:  You have a good collection of old photographs.

FA:  I love pictures.

RR:  Have your children or grandchildren, have they seen these pictures?

FA:  Not recently.  This is my father with my mother.  I don’t know who the companion is, whether it’s a visiting cousin or what.

RR:  It’s not her sister?

FA:  No.  It’s not any member of the family.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  This is a picture of my mother.  And this is a picture of my aunt and a friend.

RR:  Your Aunt Bessie?

FA:  No, no.  I don’t know who this is.  Does it say?

RR:  It says “Gertrude.”

[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]

FA:  – that I’ve done was the article that I told you about was in the Jewish Frontier Magazine.

RR:  July/August 1987.

FA:  Yeah.  And it was on the –

RR:  The first Zionist novel.

FA:  Yes.

RR:  Frances P. Addelson looks at Daniel Deronda.  It’s in Jewish Frontier: A Labor Zionist Journal.

FA:  Yes.  It brought together my interest in literature in a person like George Eliot, and my identity as a Jew, which I felt when I read Daniel Deronda for the first time.  As a matter of fact, I read the novel Daniel Deronda when I was about fifteen in the home in one of those great big old books that people give to institutions when they no longer have a big home of their own.  I was so inspired by the fact that here was an English boy brought up in aristocratic surroundings and always feeling that he was actually an outsider and finally identifying himself as a Jew.  At any rate, I did a lot of research around George Eliot.  I wrote this article.  I wrote it when I went to Harvard Learning and Retirement.  They wanted someone to give a book review on one of George Eliot’s books, and I picked Daniel Deronda because that was my favorite book.  I used the material because I got an awful lot of it while I was preparing for the article and used it to speak to Jewish groups about the part that George Eliot played in the Zionist movement before it was known as the Zionist movement when she felt in about 1880 that the Jews should have a national homeland.  I talked to Hadassah groups and to Sunday school groups about the material that I had accumulated.  The other thing that I’m very proud of was that I had –

RR:  Actually, just before you go into that, I wanted to ask you why did it wind up in a labor Zionist journal.  Were you connected with the labor Zionists?

FA:  No, I sent it away to Commentary, and they were so long in accepting that I think it was a matter of a year that I called it back.  I went to the library, and this was a magazine that accepted it.  I remember I talked to Rabbi Gittelsohn about it.  He said, “Oh, sometimes it takes them a long time to find a place for publication.”  I was very new to the writing field, so I just sent it to another magazine.  The other thing I’m quite proud of is the part I played in the early efforts of women to seek legal abortions, and I had two articles.  I think I told you about that.  That’s in my resume.

RR:  Yes.  Right.

FA:  I have two articles about the early efforts of women to demand safe abortions of Beth Israel Hospital.  I think it’s to the hospital’s credit that they investigated these requests and, in many cases, did the abortion at a time when no other hospital in Boston would touch such requests.  I happened to be working in the OB/GYN section department of the hospital.  At that time, when a woman was pregnant and had no means of raising a child, adoption was the only alternative.  At this time – I think it was probably about early 1970 when the feminist movement first began to express itself in the population – women came to the hospital requesting abortion.  Of course, the hospital couldn’t take care of all of them.  So, they came to social service, and it was my job to help them through that dilemma, whether we could perform the abortion or what.  Many, of course, we couldn’t accommodate, and it was up to me to help them get their problems resolved.  Some of them kept the pregnancy.  Others, I would be in touch with other resources like a hospital in New York City.  It was my job to see the woman through this crisis.  At any rate, it was a difficult time because many people still frowned at the very thought of abortion.  It really was a dirty word up until that time.  I did get an award from the Simmons School of Social Work, the Alumni Association, for the best publication of the year.  I think it was 1970.  And I did get responses from my articles.  One was in the –

RR:  American Journal of Ortho-Psychiatry.

FA:  And the other was in the –

RR:  American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

FA:  And I did get responses to my article from all over the world.  I think I must have gotten at least a hundred requests for xeroxed copies.  You could see that there were many, many agencies everywhere trying to solve this problem of women with unwanted pregnancies.  My article simply described what we were doing at the hospital.  That was we would give – you see, Massachusetts did have a – excuse me.  Do you want me to go on in this detail?

RR:  Absolutely.  This is very important.

FA:  Massachusetts did have a law that allowed medical abortion in the cases of women where carrying the pregnancy would cause –

RR:  Death.

FA:  Not death but ill health.  So, we were able to interpret that as emotional ill health as well as physical ill health.  However, up until 1970 or thereabouts, we only did about five abortions a year.  But now, all of a sudden, came this avalanche of requests.  Beth Israel set up a system whereby they would give psychiatric interviews to people making these requests, and I would give the social history.  But that became cumbersome because there were so many, and they couldn’t possibly accept all these requests.  Besides, the OB/GYN staff were adamant that they didn’t want their interns and doctors in training to be exclusively doing abortions.  So that there was ill feeling on the part of the medical staff.  Some trustees didn’t want to be identified as the only hospital doing abortions.  So that it was – the burden of directing or guiding these women through this difficult period in their lives came to Social Service, and I was a social worker who handled most of these cases.  It was my feeling that women at that time who requested abortion were much better put together psychologically.  Their ego was stronger than those that just decided to carry an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy to term.  That was a reason that I felt it was so necessary to help those who could see clearly that abortion was standing in the way of further self-development and further planning for a decent life.  One of my articles was called “Abortion: Source of Guilt or Growth.”  And I felt that very often, this experience of unwanted pregnancy would bring a girl up to the understanding that she had been pursuing a self-destructive course and those who wanted to change should be helped to change.

RR:  This is the article in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, which was published in October of 1973.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

FA:  One relative in this country, a Mrs. (Abel?), and she loved my father.  As a matter of fact, when my mother was ill, she took care of my younger sister for several months.  When I was out of college – I think I talked to you about this.  When I was out of college several years, I decided I wanted to go to Europe.  I told you this.  She urged me to go to Moscow and look up my father’s –

RR:  But you didn’t.  Yeah.

FA:  But I didn’t.  I told you that.

RR:  Yeah, yeah.  You did say that. 

FA:  She gave me an address, and I wrote to that address.  But I never got the letter back, and I never got any answer from it.

RR:  That was in the late ’20s, early ’30s.

FA:  Early ’30s.  In the ’20, I was a little kid.  [laughter] In the ’30s.  I went to Europe in 1937.  I didn’t go to Russia.

RR:  It would have been a hard time to go to Russia.

FA:  Yes.

RR:  It would have been dangerous actually for your relatives.

FA:  Yeah.  In connection with that abortion business, we had a colloquium in the Social Service Department at Beth Israel.  I chaired one of the segments that had to do with abortion.

RR:  This is in what year?  Let’s see.  1973.

FA:  Yeah.

RF:  Yeah.  Right around Roe vs. Wade.

FA:  Well, it was just before.  Once Roe vs. Wade happened, of course, things were a lot easier.  So I thought that was [inaudible].

RR:  Yeah.  That’s good.  That’s good.

FA:  Another thing I did that was interesting at Temple Israel.  I took the play – I directed and conceived a dramatic reading, which was done by the members of Temple Israel, on the book Call It Sleep by Henry Roth.  I made a little booklet that we passed out at that time about the reading.  We picked out a pivotal scene from the book and read it.  We had a big attendance in the social hall of Temple Israel.

RR:  I see Sylvia Goldman.  She still teaches Yiddish. 

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Do you know her?

FA:  Oh, yes. We rehearsed and rehearsed for this, so I got to know her quite well.

RR:  Oh yeah.  There you were.

FA:  Yeah.  There’s somebody else that I’m sure is still active in the temple, other people.  It was a nice experience.  So, I thought I’d show it.

RR:  Yeah.  That’s good.  That actually would be a nice piece for the history of Temple Israel.

FA:  Yeah.  Now, the librarian knew.  I told her about it, and she may have some material on that event.  She might have kept some.  I thought I’d tell you about it.  Then I have two letters from Rabbi Gittelsohn, which is very nice, one in which he indicates that he was very happy I was working on the abortion.  He, at that time, was a member of clergymen’s efforts to obtain legal abortion for women.  He and I had that in common.

RR:  Oh, this is actually – these would be good things, too, to take.  Again, just showing –

FA:  My connection with [inaudible] –

RR:  Right.  And I could just make Xerox copies of this.

FA:  Oh, I wrote this down, too.  This college, New England College, had a January term like an intercession.  They offered the kids different types of lectures during the month of January.  I did one of them.  I did a perspective on social work, trying to give an overview of what social work means as a possible vocation for these undergraduates.  So, I thought maybe you’d be interested in that.

RR:  Yeah, that’s good.

FA:  That came out of my participation in Elderhostel.  I was attending an Elderhostel at New England College, and the director asked if anybody had a background that would be of interest to undergraduates.  He chose about three of us to give this course.

RR:  That’s in the January term, 1983.

FA:  Yeah.  I wrote it down there.

RR:  Yeah, good.

FA:  Okay.

RR:  You said also you got an award from Simmons College School of Social Work.

FA:  Yeah.  But that was for the publication of the abortion – yeah.

RR:  Okay.  Let’s leave all of that stuff together.  And then we can –

FA:  I don’t know if you want to go back to the –

RR:  Yeah.  If that’s okay with you.

FA:  These are my parents at the time of their marriage.  They were married in Otis Field Hall, which is in Roxbury, very near where the Shawmut Theatre was and not far from Grove Hall.

RR:  Is the Shawmut Theatre just completely gone?

FA:  Oh, yeah, completely gone.  It was a completely Jewish neighborhood.  I think there was a mikvah in Otis Field Hall, and many marriages took place there.  It was really a Jewish neighborhood.  There was – I imagine there still is – the edifice of the Blue Hill Avenue shul, a great big imposing building where my brother was bar mitzvahed.  He was in the home at the time.  We were in the Home.  They arranged for his bar mitzvah to be in this shul.  In the home, we had services every Saturday morning.  A young hazzan would lead the songs.  

We, of course, went to Hebrew school during the week.  We followed the prayers.  I still enjoy hearing the prayers now that I can’t see.  I can’t follow the Hebrew because my Hebrew wasn’t very extensive, but at least I could read and enjoy reading the Hebrew before I lost my sight.

RR:  Frances, were you ever kosher?  Did you ever keep a kosher home?

FA:  No.  I never kept a kosher home.

RR:  Did your parents?

FA:  My mother, I remember changing the dishes at Passover time.

RR:  So, even when your mother lived with you, your brother, and your sister?

FA:  No, no.  When we were grown, we did not keep a kosher home.

RR:  So your mother didn’t when she was living with you.

FA:  No.  She was quite Americanized, and probably that was not one of her priorities.

RR:  Do you want to go through other pictures now?

FA:  Well, I think the –

RR:  There’s some wedding pictures here.

FA:  Let’s see now.

RR:  That’s the picture –

FA:  Yeah.  That’s the picture I gave you.  See, we had to get them together for the – that’s my wedding picture.  This book is divided up into the families of the Cohens.  

RR:  So that’s Judith Addelson and Stanley Clayman.

FA:  Judy is my daughter, and these are her two wonderful children who are now twenty-seven and thirty-one.  

RR:  Judy and Stanley Clayman.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Wait.  Let’s just get the date on it.  February 1983.

FA:  That’s her family.  I guess that’s all –

RR:  In New Hampshire.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Okay.

AF:  And then as we go on, of course, there’s other – that’s my sister Ruth, who lives in Florida, and these are her – you don’t want to go through the whole thing.

RR:  Why don’t we just skim through it?

AF:  Well, this is my sister, Ruth, and her husband, and her children and her grandchildren.  This is the marriage of one of her sons.  These are her grandchildren.  

RR:  That’s (Stewart?).

AF:  She has six grandchildren, and I only have two.  My sister and I are very close.  My brother died about ten years ago.  But my sister and I are very, very compatible.  We often think that we love each other so much because we were deprived of growing up together.  It meant so much to us.  Her children are very dear to me.

RR:  This is the Sugarman branch now?

FA:  Yeah.  Sugarman.

RR:  (May?) Cohen.

FA:  Yeah.  This is (May?), her younger sister, and her sister and a friend.  These are her children and grandchildren.   This is another member of the family.

RR:  So, who put this all together?

FA:  This is my uncle, who came over with my grandfather.  My cousin Betty Lifson, Betty Sugarman Lifson, and I and my sister, Ruth, put this together one summer.  We conceived of it one summer and worked on it when we got home.

RR:  Let’s see the date on it when you did it in 1984.

FA:  Yeah.  

RR:  That’s great.

FA:  Yeah.  This is the family tree.  Then we take each sister or brother of my mother, and this is a general history of the whole family.  And then we take each one – oh, this is Joseph.  Oh, no, this is an old man.  

RR:  Simon.

FA:  This is a gentleman that was born in –

RR:  1860.

FA:  Yeah.  This is him, and this is the picture that we got from them before –

RR:  Simon and (Rona?) Mary Seipp Cohen with their two youngest daughters, Libby and (Devari?) in Rusia, Poland, early 1920s.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  So, those were the women who were in the picture that you showed me.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Yeah.  Okay.  There’s that picture: (May?) and Sam in Gomel – Sugarman visiting (May’s?) mother, Rona Mary Cohen.

FA:  This must be Bessie, the oldest one that came first and was a remarkable woman because she played a big part in the lives of all of her younger siblings.  But you know it had its downside, too, because of her own children – ere she is.  

RR:  Bessie Cohen Jaffe.

FA:  You can see the self-confidence and the dignity of this woman who had accomplished really so much.  But her daughter, my cousin with whom I was quite, very close, told me that she always felt deprived because her mother was so busy with these new people coming from another country and then getting settled.  It was her philosophy to have her neighbors from Russia, their children, their girls, come over, and she would put them to work in her –

RR:  Seamstress.

FA:  – seamstress place.  And she would see that they sent money home to their families.  They became fast friends.  I remember so many times meeting people who said that they had worked for her and what a wonderful person she was.  This must be my mother and –

RR:  Right, and her sister.

FA:  Yeah, and her older sister.  This is an early picture of my mother, father and –no, no.  This is her husband.  This is Bessie’s husband.  Oh, this is her family.  This is Dr. Isadore Jaffe, her son, who became an allergist doctor.  

RR:  With their children in 1951.

FA:  Yeah, their children.  This is another child with Evelyn and Charlie [inaudible].  This is my close cousin my age, a little older, with whom I exchanged many confidences.  When I would admire her mother because her mother was good to all the children, she felt deprived.

RR:  Now, this book is organized by branches of the family with an overall introduction.  And then, there are representative pictures in addition to a kind of narrative about each family.  Great book.

FA:  Yeah.  I think the pictures is what makes it.  I don’t know what that says.  This is one of Bessie’s children.  Isn’t that costume something?

RR:  Yeah.  It’s a costume of a little prince.

FA:  Yeah.  Now, these are Bessie’s three children.  There was another son born later.  This is the son that was born later.  He was one year old when the influenza epidemic occurred.  I told you the epidemic took Bessie and my father within weeks of each other.  That devastated my mother.  Oh, this is one of the grandchildren.  Now, this goes on to another sister, I guess.

RR:  Yeah.  So there’s like individual pictures of as many relatives as –

FA:  Yeah.  I think we went up to here.  Yeah.  This is where my family begins.  But I think we talked about it.  Yeah.  We did this.

RR:  Right.

FA:  Okay.

RR:  Okay.  So this is another really interesting document, which is called the Cohen-Katz – in parentheses – Seipp – Family History in Words and Pictures: 1860-1984.

FA:  Now the interesting thing about Katz and Cohen is I found a little article in the paper saying that Katz is an acronym for Cohen.  It means, of course – Cohen means –

RR:  Priest.

FA:  Priest, yeah.  But we often wondered why one member of the family called himself Katz, Joe Katz.  His children always wondered.  But they’re the same name.

RR:  Oh, that’s interesting.  I never knew that.

FA:  Yeah.  I put that in.  I found that in the newspaper somewhere. Here it is, I think, isn’t it?

RR:  Oh yeah. Abzug means “proof sheet.”  Bronfman means “a man who makes or sells whiskey,” which is interesting since that’s what Bronfman does.  Katz is an acronym for Kohen Tzedek, which means “priest of righteousness.”  And Rothschild means “red shield.”  Very good.

FA:  So, that was a labor of love.  Now, this you can take.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  Now, these are pictures, as I say, that I don’t know who they are.   They were friends of my parents.  If they’re of any use or value to the Jewish Historical Society or your group.

RR:  Well, let’s look through them and see if we can make out anything.

FA:  I don’t know any of those people.

RR:  Let’s see.  

FA:  That’s just my note.

RR:  So there’s a person –

FA:  There’s no name on it.

RR:  Yeah.  From New Haven.  Right.  Just a lot of different early photographs.

FA:  Yeah.  I thought they might be interesting because of their costume or their –

RR:  Right.  This one looks like the same person as that one.  Oh, no, maybe not.  Yeah.

FA:  Oh, by the way, how did the pictures come out of your family?

RR:  Oh, good.

FA:  Really?

RR:  Yeah.  And yours did, too.  You saw them, right?

FA:  I did.  I saw them very briefly.  I’ll have to look at them more closely. What does that say?

RR:  Friend of Gertrude Maretsky.

FA:  Well, if this is a friend – that’s on my husband’s side. [inaudible]

RR:  Friend of Gertrude Maretsky.  Here’s another one.

FA:  I think [inaudible].

RR:  Let’s see.  What else?  Let’s make sure.  I’ll just make sure there’s nothing written on –

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Mr. Frank.

FA:  Oh, yeah.  I remember my mother talking about him.  But he doesn’t mean anything to me.  I’ve got so much stuff that I wanted to get rid of some of these things.

RR:  Let me see.  Somebody who graduated.  Somebody’s graduation picture from Boston.  Maybe a friend of yours from college, do you think?

FA:  No.  It wouldn’t be a friend of mine.  She doesn’t look Jewish.

RR:  No.

FA:  My husband told me a story of – what was his name? – a very famous Jewish philosopher, who married out of Judaism.  His parents considered him dead.  When he went to Tufts – when my husband went to Tufts, he met the daughter of this man.

RR:  (Wittenberg?).

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Attorney and friends.

FA:  Yeah.  Now, those were Roxbury lawyers.  But they don’t mean anything to me.

RR:  Okay.  Let’s see.  What else?  Could that be you?

FA:  No.  Another graduation picture, probably.

RR:  Yeah.  Yeah.  It doesn’t have a name on it.  Okay.  Let’s see.  A baby picture from New York City and another picture from New York City.  So, we’ll put them back in.

FA:  Yeah.  I have no use for them.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  You want to take them.

RR:  No, actually, because I don’t think we’re going to need them.

FA:  No.  So, shall I just destroy them?

RR:  Oh, no, don’t do that.  You might want to give them to the Museum of Jewish History at Brandeis.

FA:  Jewish Historical Museum.

RR:  Yeah.

FA:  That takes a little effort.

RR:  Do you want me to take them and see if I can do that?

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  If you want to.

RR:  Sure.  Okay.

FA:  Because I’ve got so much that I’d like to put them in some kind of order, and that wouldn’t have any place.

RR:  Okay.  Yeah.  I’ll put them back.

FA:  This is just a picture of me at a colloquium that I described already at Beth Israel when I was leading the colloquium on abortion.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  That’s this one.

RR:  Right.  Oh, good.  Okay.  So, maybe I’ll just put that together with this.  Okay.

FA:  You’re not taking this, are you?

RR:  All right.  I’ll just make a note of it.  Let me just say there’s a picture that on the back says, “Seminar, Beth Israel Hospital, 1970” on it.  It’s about “Abortion: Source of Guilt or Growth.”  Actually, it must be later than 1970 because it says –

FA:  Yes.

RR:  This is 1973.  It’s 1973.  Okay.

FA:  You’re not taking that, are you?

RR:  The picture?

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Oh, I thought you were giving it to me.

FA:  No, no.  That’s the only one I have.

RR:  Okay.  Here.

FA:  Yeah.  I don’t think you need it.

RR:  Well, we might, but if we do, we’ll ask you for it and make a copy.

FA:  Okay.  You’ve seen everything. [laughter]

RR:  Okay.  Do you have other things you want to talk about today?

FA:  Well, let’s see.  Where did we stop last time?

RR:  We stopped right after you got married.  Really didn’t talk much about the –  we talked a little bit about your living on Gibbs Street with your husband’s mother.  We didn’t really talk that much about the 1950s or beyond that.  But we have done some of that in the pictures.  Right.

FA:  Well, I lived from 1950 to 1960 on 3 Gibbs Street in Brookline.  As I have described, I was engaged in activities at the school and the beginnings of a Jewish Community Center for Brookline.  After my children were in the, I think, about the third and fifth grades, I decided I wanted some time to go back to work.  Did I talk about this?

RR:  You talked a little bit about it.

FA:  So I enrolled in the Simmons School of Social Work to get my master’s degree in Social Work.  I attended Simmons part-time for about three or four years, and I got the degree, I think, it was about 1955.  I just was going through some of my old papers and found a letter from my son saying, “Congratulations on your graduation, mother.”  Of course, the children couldn’t quite understand why mother was going to school, just as my grandchildren couldn’t understand my attending all the Elderhostels at different universities.  I remember my grandson saying, “Grandma, why do you still go to school?”  He was of the age – I think he was about in the second or third grade when school was a burden to him.  He preferred the sports rather than the books at that age.  Right now, he’s a very successful businessman and doing very well.  He went on to Bentley College and graduated with honors. and is very self-reliant and doing well.

RR:  Does he live around here?

FA:  Yeah.  He lives in Newton, as a matter of fact.  I see him not as often as I wish, but I hear from him.  And my granddaughter – now I’m jumping way ahead – is a graphic artist.  She’s self-supporting and has her own apartment here in Brighton.  I see her more often.  It’s always a joy to have her visit or go out with her.

RR:  And she was the one who came to Elsa Dorfman’s.

FA:  Yes.

RR:  And you took a picture together there.

FA:  She’s very, very dear to me.  Well, to go back, between 1950 and 1960, I lived in Brookline.  And then in ’60, we bought a house in Newton, where I lived for thirty-three years.  It was an old house and we remodeled it.  And our children went to – both children went to the University of Mass.  

RR:  In Amherst?

FA:  In Amherst.  My son died in 1970.  I have a scholarship set up for him in memoriam for some undergraduate who would spend some time in Israel or do something for the benefit of the state of Israel.  I wanted that individual to have some funds so that he could spend some time in Israel working for the benefit of the state.

RR:  This is a fund that is at UMass Amherst.

FA:  Yes.  My son always was interested in Israel and wanted to go there.  His idea was to dig some of the archaeological sites.  Yeah.  But, unfortunately, he never got there.

RR:  How old was he when he died?

FA:  He was twenty-five.  It was a very, very sad time for my husband and me for many years.  Of course, it still remains a very sad experience for us.  My daughter went on and married Stanley Clayman.  Stanley was in the shoe business.  His father had a shoe factory in Bangor, Maine.  That closed up when the shoe industry faltered.  Stanley now runs his own business.  I have to give you the exact name of the business, but he’s management executive – the recruitment of management executives [Management Recruiters International].  He started because of his knowledge of the shoe business, but he’s branched out and done very well and places people in all kinds of positions, really all over this country, even Europe.  

RR:  And they live in New Hampshire.

FA:  They have a home in New Hampshire and a boat on Lake Winnipesaukee, where they spend a lot of time in the summertime and where my husband and I spent many happy days with them there.  Presently, I’m retired.  As soon as we retired, as I say, we became interested in Elderhostel and soon in the Harvard Institute for retirement, Harvard Institute for –

RR:  For Learning and Retirement.  

FA:  Learning and Retirement.  I think I described – didn’t I describe that I came there, and after about three or four years, I became a group leader. 

RR:  Yes.

FA:  I’d like to talk a little more about what we did in our group because it was something that I just loved doing.  We would pick out pivotal pieces in great literature, act them out, and then talk about the significance of human relationships in connection with these pieces of literature.  And it was a lot of – and some research.  I felt very indulged that I could pick out my favorite pieces of literature for the group to concentrate on.  But they all seemed to like what I chose, and it was a very uplifting experience.  I stopped when my husband became ill.  And then he died soon afterward.  He died in 1990 in February.  We had been on a visit to San Miguel, where we had gone for the three previous winters for about a month or so.

RR:  Where is San Miguel?

FA:  It’s in Mexico.  It’s way up in the mountains.  He became ill quite suddenly, and the medical resources were extremely primitive.  And when we got home, we realized that – we came home as soon as he was able to travel, and he entered the Brigham Hospital and died about a month later after he entered.  So, it was really quite a sudden loss for me. 

RR:  What was wrong with him?

FA:  Well, he had very high blood pressure, and he was being monitored very carefully by the Brigham.  I think he was a little careless about his care when he got to –

RR:  To Mexico.

FA:  – to Mexico.  He felt he could do more than he should have.  He was one of those men who didn’t want me to take on any responsibility for his care.  He always insisted – unless I overruled him – to go to the doctor himself for his – in his previous examinations.  As I say, the loss was very sudden.

RR:  How old was he when he died?

FA:  He was seventy [inaudible] my age.  I’m eighty-eight now.  So he was about seventy-six when he died.

RR:  So that was like twelve years ago.

FA:  Yeah.  No, no.  He died in 1990.

RR:  Oh, so he must have been older than that.

FA:  Yeah.  He was older than that.  We had a good life together.  It was hard at times because he was very frugal.  He had undergone the ravages of – [END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A] – and lived a rural, isolated – not an isolated life.  There was a small Jewish community there, people who ran small enterprises along Main Street.  But it was essentially a French-Canadian community.  I remember when I visited with him once up there, I was shocked to hear the girl in the five-and-ten-cent store talk only French.  He just couldn’t wait until his family moved to Roxbury, Mass, after they had a fire which demolished their entire home and all their belongings.  He was supposed to have expressed some satisfaction that “now we can move to Boston.”

RR:  Do you know how old he was when that happened?

FA:  He was just beginning high school, so that he was probably about fifteen, I think, or fourteen or fifteen.  His father was a remarkable man.  He had a large family.  He had two wives.  

RR:  Two wives in succession.

FA:  In succession, yeah.  He was quite a figurehead in the community and a scholar, a Hebrew scholar.  As a matter of fact, when some of the hunters would go into the woods for the winter in order to spend most of the time there and live in very primitive quarters, they would give him their money to save.  In other words, for many of them, he was safer than the bank.  This old gentleman, William Addelson, was his name.  I named my son after him.  William Addelson was quite an individual.  I remember my husband telling me the story of when William Addelson’s brother, who went to live in Winnipeg, was killed suddenly.  He left a non-Jewish wife and two children in Winnipeg.  I don’t know what happened to the wife.  But for some reason or other, I guess the wife died.  The wife had died first, and then William Addelson’s brother was killed suddenly, and the two children were left.  So, William Addelson got on a train and, according to my husband, who was then a very young boy, it took him several days to travel to Winnipeg – Manitoba, I guess, was the area.

RR:  The province, yeah.

FA:  He picked up the two children, and some money had been left them.  He took them back to Berlin, and they lived with him and his family until they were grown.  When they became of age, the money that had been left by his brother was given to them for their college education.  And they went on – I think they went to BU [Boston University].

RR:  It sounds like your husband’s father’s family had been in this country a lot longer.

FA:  Yes.  They came longer than what?

RR:  Certainly than your family.

FA:  Well, I think they came at the turn of the – I think William Addelson came at the turn of the century.

RR:  Oh, he did?  Okay.

FA:  Yeah.  This is all from my husband’s memory.  He came to this country and worked in the mills of Lowell, I think.  My husband told me that the gates were locked in the morning, and they had to work all day long.  William Addelson felt that he didn’t want to continue this kind of life.  So, he left, and he – now, let me see.  Did he walk?  He got a horse and wagon together some way?  He would go from community to community on the way north to sell aprons and clothing to farmers.  He would stay overnight in their homes.  He learned English from the children of the household at night, doing their home lessons with him.  He traveled up to Berlin, New Hampshire, where he had a friend who had established himself.  When he got there, he decided to stay.  He had this little business.  It was a furniture store.  He was instrumental with his friend and a few more Jewish families that came and settled there to start a synagogue, to build a synagogue.  

When I was married to my husband, we came up there.  He had already died by the time I was married.  As a matter of fact, I came up there to my husband’s father’s funeral.  And there was the temple.  And in 1940, they were still attending services and using the temple.  Now, we as a family, my husband and I and our children, would go to the White Mountains, which is just a little bit south of Berlin, New Hampshire, every year, and we would visit this community.  We saw how little by little people, Jewish people, were leaving that community.

RR:  Is Berlin near Bethlehem?

FA:  Yes.  It’s north of Bethlehem.  And we would go there every year because my mother–in–law had a sister who remained in Berlin almost until she died.  We would visit her.  We would see the little synagogue.  But each year that we came, there were fewer and fewer families.  The last few times we came, they had rented out the synagogue to Seventh-Day Adventists for services during the year except for the Jewish holidays.  I think the last time we came, they had either sold it or it was completely Seventh Day Adventists.  But they still had a little marker on the wall, which William Addelson’s name on it as one of the founders of the synagogue.  When we would go up there, we would go to the Jewish cemetery where William Addelson and one of his sons is buried.  His wife is buried there, and one of his daughters, who didn’t marry. 

RR:  So, how many children were there?  How many brothers and sisters did your husband have?

FA:  My husband had two brothers.  But the old man, William Addelson, had about five or six children.

RR:  Oh, because of his two wives.

FA:  Yeah.  Five or six children, and my husband’s father was one of them.  One of the other brothers was Dr. Nathan Addelson, who was well known in the Jewish community.  His wife, particularly, was instrumental in setting up the Jewish Recuperative Center on – I think it’s on Route 1 right across the street from the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center.

RR:  Oh, yeah.  Yeah.  I know that place.

FA:  Dr. Nathan Addelson.  He had four or five sons.  Of those children, one became a nurse, and she had a literary talent.  She used to write for newspapers.  She never married.  Then, there was a blind woman who lived at the lighthouse in New York City that the nurse was custodian of.  Then there was another son that my husband said was just too independent to remain long in a town like Berlin, New Hampshire.  He was the prodigal son who ran away.  Went and married a southern woman who was Jewish but had lineage back to some general in the American Army.

RR:  In the Revolution?

FA:  I don’t know if it was as far back as that.  She came from an aristocratic southern home, and she had no children.  This prodigal uncle of my husband’s would come back with his southern wife and bring gifts to the children from somewhere.  Archie was his name.  [He] did very well in business.

RR:  So, they had no children of their own.

FA:  They had no children of their own.  His wife had two unmarried sisters, and they would come.  They were the family of Archie and his wife.  My husband would say they would come up to Berlin, which was an industrial spot in these beautiful White Mountains.  They would come up bringing another part of the world with them and, as I say, gifts and such things.  That’s what he remembers about them.  So that’s how my husband’s grandfather’s family were disbursed.  Two of my husband’s aunts settled around Boston.  One married a Saperstein, and her son and my husband were contemporaries.  That son did very well in business. I sometimes see his widow.  He was Philip Saperstein.  He did very well, as I say.  I see his wife occasionally.  Of my husband’s two brothers, one was a bachelor, never married, and lived with us for a while when we lived on Gibbs Street.  The other married and had two daughters.  I keep in touch with them.  One is not married.  The other has four children, and they are very religious.  As a matter of fact, one of those children, I understand, is being groomed – he’s at the University of Mass, and he’s being groomed by a Jewish organization that paid for his indoctrination in a month-long course at one of the colleges.  I haven’t got the story in all its details.  But my niece by my husband, Sandra, married a Rosen – see, my memory is going now.  

RR:  Is it in this book, or this the other side of your family?

FA:  No, no.  That’s my husband’s side of the family.  Not Rosenbaum.

RR:  Rosenberg?

FA:  No.

RR:  Rosenblatt.

FA:  If you turn it off, I could –  Do you want to turn it off and get –?

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  (Rosenbloom?).

FA:  (Rosenbloom?).  What more can I tell you?

RR:  Well, so your children –?

FA:  My children live in Manchester, New Hampshire.  They are interested in collecting antiques.  They have some beautiful artwork in their home.  As I say, they have two children: Jane, who’s a graphic artist, and Gregory, who went to Bentley and is in business himself.  Of course, my daughter is my mainstay.  She’s the one that takes care of all my business.  She visits me loyally every Friday.  We spend the day together.  She’s very dear to me.  She’s my lifeline, as they say.   Right now, she’s in Venice with her husband.  They’re taking a week off.  They take a week off every year.  

RR:  Have you always been really close to her?

FA:  Yes.  When the children were younger, we bought some timesharing on Lake Winnipesaukee.  We bought the weeks that the children were out of school.  For several years, we would meet down there and spend the week together.  And then, as the children grew older, Stanley bought this boat.  The children don’t go to the boat very often, but they do sometimes.  My husband and I would go up there to be with Judy and Stanley on weekends.  And once, we lived on the boat for a week at a time.

RR:  Frances, when you had your household, did you observe the Jewish holidays in the home?  Did you have Shabbat, or did you light candles on Friday night?

FA:  We lit candles.  We didn’t make any ceremony of Friday night.  We didn’t keep a kosher house.  But I was always identified with Judaism and interested in it and felt a kinship with the Jewish community.  I’ve been a Temple Israel member since the children were small.

RR:  And what about for Passover?  Did you have seders in the house?

FA:  Yes.  We always had seders.  The Jewish holidays, of course, I stayed out of work or out of school or whatever.  We always belonged to a temple.  I think as a family, Temple Israel was the first temple we belonged to and the only one.  I think I’m more of a social Jew than a religious one.  But the service does stir something very important in me.  I think it’s because it goes way back to attending services every Saturday in the home.

RR:  So, back to your roots, really, back to your early childhood.  Is there anything else you would like to say on the tape now?

FA:  I can’t think of anything that – I did say that during my college years, I lived with an aunt, my mother’s sister.

RR:  On Maple Avenue, did you say?

FA:  Yeah.  Yeah.  I think I talked about that and how I concentrated – in the summertime, I would let loose, and I was a counselor at camp.  I had a lot of fun doing that.  I told you about Saul Drucker, the principal of the home – 

RR:  Yeah.

FA:  – and how he later established a school for retarded children and this camp that many children from wealthier families would attend – Pine Grove Camp in Billerica when Billerica was a small community.  We were almost across the street from the little library, the school, and the few houses that were around.

RR:  It was probably mostly farmland then, right?

FA:  Yes, there was a lot of farmland at that time.

RR:  What about your connection to Radcliffe at this point?  Is it mostly through the Lifelong Learning Center or?

FA:  Well, I’m a member of the Ann Radcliffe Society because I gave a gift to Radcliffe.  The first thing I did when I figured out my expenses and what I would need as a widow was to be sure that Tufts and Radcliffe were given a gift in return for the scholarships that both my husband and I benefited from when we were attending.  The University of Mass, of course, is in memory of my son.  So those are my favorite charities.  And the Jewish Appeal, of course, I give to.  Those are the most meaningful of my donations.

RR:  Your charitable donations.  Let me see.  I don’t have any more questions unless –

FA:  I can’t think of anything right now.  You know I suffered a very serious automobile accident.  Did I tell you about that?

RR:  You said you were hit by a car in front of the house.

FA:  Yeah.  It just turned my life upside down.  It happened in April of this year, 1997.  I was on my way to meet a group of friends.  By the way, during all my married life, we had a group of couples that got together quite often, exchanged dinners with, and went to the theatre and had dinner afterward at each other’s homes.  And we took vacations together.  Those were the Needelmans. the Fogels, the Silvermans, and the (Aronis?).  Anyhow, the (Aronies?) have a very enterprising daughter who is a writer and a teacher of writing.  She’s established herself on Martha’s Vineyard.  The Gardner Museum gave her an award for being their resident artist for the month.  She was giving her paper on that day.  

Well, that was the day that I was hit.  My friends came to get me.  Of course, there was no answer.  I was lying on the street in front of the building. 

RR:  So, did they find you outside?

FA:  They didn’t find me outside because it was on the other side, Beacon Street.  At any rate, they were pretty upset.  But that experience of being knocked down completely just left me – and that long, long stay at the [inaudible] Hospital and the injuries I received put me in a very dark mood for months.  Fortunately, I’m out of it now, thank God.  I think I told you all this.

RR:  No, you didn’t actually tell me this.  You did tell me some of what happened, but you didn’t tell me this part.

FA:  It was as though – I had been very active up until the time of the accident.  My daughter has a place in Loon, New Hampshire, where they go skiing.  During the summertime, I and my friends would use it as a lovely place to walk.  Just before the accident, we took a trail in the White Mountains along a river and an old railroad track, which was seven or eight miles into the woods just the year before.  And now, I can barely walk around the block because of my physical condition and weakness.  So, I felt I was really – the thing that depressed me was here I had lived so actively up until then.  Then, all of a sudden, it happened so suddenly.  And it happened at a time when I was so assured that I was doing the right thing.  I lost my eyesight.  Rather, I developed macular degeneration about three and a half years ago.  I took a course on how to handle myself.  I took some guidance – several sessions – on how to handle myself with a stick to cross the way, the traffic of the street.  I was just doing the right thing when this woman plowed me down.  The feeling that I had been on a fool’s mission, thinking I would live forever or I could do whatever I wanted to forever.  And here I was, lying helpless.

RR:  What happened, she was making a turn or something?

FA:  No.  She had made a turn and came around and was looking for the Star Market.  She said she didn’t see me.  She thought I was dead practically because she came running over and said, “Please don’t die.”  At any rate, the effect it had on me, the suddenness of it, just depleted me.  I thought to myself, “What business do I have staying in this apartment alone when I should be [have] somebody taking care of me?”  It just shook me up to the very marrow.  But I came out of the depression, thank God, and I’m back now to my – not to everything.  I can’t walk.  And walking meant so much to me because I was losing my sight.  At least I could walk and see things.

RR:  Right.

FA:  I can’t even write now.  I don’t have the motivation to write.  It was during my retirement that I started to write some things.  And I thought, “Well, gee, I could write my family history.”  So when you came along, it was as though it were an answer to my wishes because I don’t know how I could write.  I have a computer, and before my accident, I could run the computer and type my stuff up with big, big letters.  Now I can’t even see those letters.

RR:  Oh, really.  So it’s gotten –?

FA:  I haven’t gone –

RR:  Is that because you think the accident just made that a lot worse?

FA:  I don’t know.  I really can’t blame it altogether on the accident.  But it certainly knocked out my motivation for doing anything.  Secondly, whether it had any physical effect on my optic nerves or what, I don’t know.  But I don’t see to read with my machine, my Optelec machine, as well as I did before.  So, I just hope I can continue living here alone and managing.  I have somebody come in to help with –

RR:  To clean and stuff?

FA:  Yeah, to clean.  Mostly, it’s cutting up the food and being around the stove and that sort of thing, which unnerves me.  But I have a nice woman that comes in a few hours a day, about four or five times a week.

RR:  I’m really glad that you’re talking about this because while this Jewish Women’s Archive is very much interested in learning about your past, I think that it’s also important to talk about the present and just how –

FA:  How I’m going to manage.

RR:  Exactly.  You know my mother lives downstairs from me.  So, I see the differences when one gets older.  People that you love die.

FA:  Get sick.

RR:  Or get sick and your body gives out and you have an accident, as in your case, and it’s just a very different kind of life from the life that, say, those of living in our middle age are living.  So, I think that’s really important, also.  I felt that also in interviewing Bernice Frieze, that both of you have gone from living in houses – my mother, too, for that matter – to apartments that are more manageable.  They’re all on one floor.  So, I think that’s an important part of what this project is about, also, is just talking about what life is like now.

FA:  And how people manage when they get older.

RR:  That’s right.  And it’s mostly women and, mostly widows as we saw at the tea.  Just about every woman in the room had been married and was a widow.

FA:  Of course, when we gave up our home at 36 Irving Street in Newton, we had to decide.  We wanted to pick a place where we would finish up.  Of course, we were then too young to even consider assisted living.  In fact, I never considered assisted living until I had the accident.  Even with the diminishing vision, I felt I could manage.  I lived alone.  I didn’t have any help here.  As I say, my daughter comes down every week and keeps an eye on me.  But she’s in Manchester, New Hampshire, which is quite a distance away.  And when she retires – when they retire in about five years, they’re thinking of moving any place.  They’re not going to be confined because of me.  I hope not, anyhow.  So, I was pretty shook up.  [laughter] But I think I can manage now.

RR:  Well, thank goodness you weren’t hurt more.

FA:  That’s right.  As the woman who works for me said, “Your time hasn’t come.  He doesn’t want you now.”

RR:  You know the 121-year-old woman – remember the one in France?  She said, “God must have overlooked me.” [Laughter]

FA:  Who said that?

RR:  There was a woman, Jeanne Calment, I think, she lived to be a hundred twenty-one or twenty-two, sold cigarettes to Van Gogh.  In fact, I guess in France they have this system where a younger person will buy your apartment with the assumption that you’ll die at a reasonable time.  And they sort of have the option to get your apartment.  And the person who bought her apartment died way before she did. [laughter]  

FA:  That’s interesting.  Well, this has been a very nice experience for me.  By the way, will I get a copy of some of this?

RR:  Yeah, if you want a copy of the tape, absolutely.

FA:  Oh, I’d love to have a copy.

RR:  Yeah.

FA:  As a matter of fact, my niece is interested in family matters.  She started once, [and] came down with a tape recorder.  But we were so busy doing things we didn’t get very far.  So, she’ll be delighted if I can have a copy of all this.

RR:  Sometimes I think it’s easier for somebody who’s not part of the family to –

FA:  To ask the questions.

RR:  Right.  Right.

FA:  So, I’m really very grateful that you took the time and had the interest in knowing all these details.  I’m sure everybody has a lot of stuff.

RR:  Yeah.  I really love this project.  

FA:  Really?

RR:  I think it’s brilliant.  It’s a brilliant project because there’s no way that I would have known you otherwise.  It really connects those of us who are members of Temple Israel who are younger, although not that much younger, with those of you who have been members of Temple Israel for some time.  It’s a great connection.  I’m really grateful to the temple also for –

FA:  I wonder if there are the same themes that go through many lives.

RR:  There are a lot of the same themes, there are.

FA:  I think one theme would be the way we moved.  We moved with the Jewish population moving because we felt at home, I suppose.  Or a Jewish friend recommended an apartment in a Jewish community.  But I had a lot of non-Jewish friends in my work, in my social work.

RR:  Well that’s one of the things, also, it seems to me, that you can see.  I mean, it’s moving geographically.  It’s moving up economically.  And it’s moving out of the Jewish family circle into more contact with other people.  And the same for them because – actually, that was one question I wanted to ask you.  Did you experience much antisemitism in your life?  Do you remember?

FA:  I think you asked me that.  I really don’t think I did.

RR:  I know I asked you about it in terms of Radcliffe.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  But I was just wondering about other things, other times.

FA:  Did I tell you there was a group of Jewish girls?  I’ve forgotten the name – it wasn’t Hillel.

RR:  B’nai Brith girls?

FA:  It wasn’t B’nai Brith.  It wasn’t Hadassah.  I can’t remember the name.  But I could find out, I think.  I had my Radcliffe book.  I think that was one of the few things I belonged to when I was at Radcliffe because I didn’t have any time to join the extracurricular activities.  But it is a fascinating experience to get all this material together.  I’m so proud of the fact that I got that Home for Jewish Children book together.

RR:  Oh, yeah.  Actually, that’s the other thing.  I feel like you’re inspiring me.  I have a ton of photographs at home.  My son is graduating from high school.  And I thought, “Oh, I really should at least make him a little book.”  That’s very inspiring.

FA:  I think we talked about the attitude of the kids who were in the home.  Most of them didn’t want to identify themselves as home children.  Apparently, I didn’t have that reservation when I was in the home.  When I left, I was very quiet about it.  Until very, very recently, I didn’t talk about it.

RR:  Has there ever been a reunion of people from the home?

FA:  Yeah.  There was one that was very nice about ten or fifteen years ago.  There was a reunion.  The Ladies Auxiliary of the Home, once the home was disbanded, turned into a group that became interested in a specific problem.  I think it was retarded children or problem children.  That was it – children with social or psychological problems, I think.  A Mrs. Greenberg called me once and said she was trying to get the people who had graduated from the home together.  I called the few that I knew.  They didn’t want to be identified with her organization because they were problem children.  Of course, normal children wouldn’t need institutional care.  But this Ladies’ Auxiliary belonged to an institution where children were placed for therapeutic reasons.  The few people I talked to didn’t want to go.  I went, and I met some people who were doing social work.  I remember this nice gentleman – I can’t think of his name – who worked for the Jewish Philanthropies, came over to me and thanked me for coming.  I often wonder how many of these people are still alive in the pictures I have.

RR:  Yeah.

FA:  Yeah.

RR:  Right.  

FA:  You know the five years of my life were very intense years because that was – I can remember those years almost better than my early married years.   Maybe because I have the pictures, and I didn’t take too many pictures of [inaudible].  I didn’t take as many pictures when we were first married.  When I was first married, things were very tough.  We were married secretly.  Did I tell you that?

RR:  Yes.

FA:  And my husband and I were separated for a whole year.

RR:  Then you got married again, right?

FA:  Well, I got married by a rabbi, my friend, Rabbi David Alpert.  We didn’t consider the first marriage a legitimate marriage.  It was just because we wanted to hold onto each other even though we knew that we might have to be separated for a while.  But it was Depression time, and it left its mark on my husband.

RR:  You say, even through all of his life, that was the case.

FA:  Most of his life, he was very frugal and always planning for the future.  Always planning for the future.  But we did have some good times.  As I say, every summer we went up to the White Mountains, and we took the children.  And we went mountain climbing and mixed with other families who were living at Holiday Acres with us.  I remember one summer when we were up at Holiday Acres, it was during the early years of the war.  There was talk about gas masks and epidemics.  The polio epidemic came about that time.  We felt so secure up there in the mountains with the fresh air and not being in closed places where the polio epidemic seemed to be spreading.  Joan Needleman and Bob Needleman were members of Temple Israel.  Right now, she is dying.  She’s at the Deaconess Hospital in the hospice section.  I saw her just the other night.  She can barely speak.  I’m not even sure she remembered me.

RR:  What’s wrong with her? 

FA:  Well, she’s in the last stages of ovarian cancer.

RR:  Oh.  How old is she?

FA:  She’s my age.  As a matter of fact, she’s a little younger.  But we’ve known her ever since we were married and even before.  I talked a lot because they tell me that she can hear, but she can’t respond.  I talked about the years that we were together while our children were growing up with all the joys and the problems that the children brought.  I remember talking about Holiday Acres when we would escape from the city and be up there in the pure air of the White Mountains and away from talk of war and epidemics and things like that.  So, she has a wonderful daughter who lives in Canada and left her husband and two children to be with her mother during these last days.  She’s back and forth between Canada and Montreal and the hospital.  So, it’s a very sad time.

RR:  Is her husband alive?

FA:  Oh yes.  Her husband has been a wonderful source of support during this illness.  It’s lasted over a year and a half.  They’re very faithful members of Temple Israel.  He’s been some help.  As a matter of fact, he belongs to a support group for relatives with – support group of relatives of patients who have terminal illness for a year and a half, and he’s done everything to make her going as painless and has helped as he can.  This is a time when there seems to be so much sickness around and so much –

RR:  Yeah, especially as the weather gets colder, too.

FA:  Well, I’m really talking about a much more serious illness.  The woman on this side of me got sick very suddenly.  She was a source of help to me when I first lost my sight.  And all of a sudden, she got sick, and she’s going downhill.  The woman across the way – they were bringing food to her from – did you hear them say?

RR:  Yeah, Meals-on-Wheels.

FA:  Meals-on-Wheels.  She rather suddenly got sick.  The woman over here is having a hard time walking and has to walk with a walker.  Her therapy has stopped improving her condition.  So, she feels kind of blue.

RR:  So, are these all mostly Jewish older women who live here?

FA:  Certainly not mostly.  There are, I think, about 230 condos, and it just happens that this floor has all this sickness on it.  That didn’t help my recuperation any.  But there are a lot of people that – I think the majority of people still go to work.  There are some young families here.  But there are a good number of older women, and they’ve been a source of help to me.  Esther Karten, K-A-R-T-E-N, is a devoted member of Temple Israel.  She goes every Friday night and Saturday morning.  She and I used to walk together and vacation together in Ogunquit and in Loon, where I have a place.  Now she’s very helpful to me.  She takes me to temple whenever I’m up to it.

RR:  Is she also about your age?

FA:  Oh, no.  She’s much younger.

[TELEPHONE RINGS]

FA:  Will you excuse me?

RR:  Sure.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  Okay.  Good timing.  We’re almost at the end of the tape.  But what I want to say is I have to just check and make sure we do all the paperwork.  If you think of other things you should just call me.  

FA:  Well, of course, there’s this whole business of – don’t put this on the tape.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  Another indication of all of Frances’s work is a poster from a talk that she gave at North Adams State College, “Highlights of a Forty-Year Career of a Social Worker,”  It doesn’t have a date on it, but it’s a nice poster that might be good for the exhibit.  These are pictures of your husband?

FA:  Yeah.  This is he.  This is the general.  He’s got glasses.

[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]

RR:  – an urgent deadline for error free data to answer a Congressional inquiry concerning the relocation of the Food and Container Division.”  This is November 23, 1965.

FA:  Just read this yourself and see if it’s important.  

RR:  Then, also, “Department of the Army Certificate of Appreciation to Arthur Addelson on the occasion of his retirement from federal service.”  I wish to extend to you my personal thanks and the appreciation of the United States Army for the many years of service which you have given to our country.”  This is dated 31 July 1975.

FA:  I know I have some other pictures, but I can’t seem to [inaudible].  Well, if you want to take some things – that’s the only copy I have.  

RR:  Yeah, I won’t take this for now.  If they want it, we can get it.  I think the scarf is another thing they might want.  But I’ll take some of these pictures now, and then if they want other things, will arrange that.

FA:  Let me just put labels on.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  Who are the people in this picture here?

FA:  Oh, I think Joan Needelman is there.

RR:  Where is she?  You’re in the middle.  

FA:  Yeah.  Joan Needleman is a member of the temple.  I think the Fogels were there, Mary and Daniel Fogel, who are very close friends of ours.

RR:  And the man – is that –?

FA:  That’s Bob Needleman probably.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  Friends.  I think he took the picture.  I think Bob took the picture, so it couldn’t be him.  

RR:  So, this is at Simmons?

FA:  Yeah.  This is at the Museum of Science where the celebration took place.

RR:  Oh, I see.  Right.  The Museum of Science.  Could it be your son?

FA:  No.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  If I look at it under my – this doesn’t help.  I have to look under [inaudible] –

RR:  No.  It’s okay.

FA:  [inaudible]

RR:  Okay.  So, facing the photograph, the person on the left is Joan Needleman.

FA:  Joan Needleman, member of the temple.  This is my husband.  This is me.  This is Mary and Danny Fogel.  Bob Needleman is taking the picture.

RR:  Okay.

FA:  [inaudible]

RR:  This is the picture of Frances getting the award at Simmons College.  It’s included with the actual award certificate. 

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  There are a number of things which Frances has which might be of interest to the exhibit committee, including a postcard in Yiddish from her grandfather [and] a book of pictures about the Jewish home in Dorchester.  I think I see – what is this?  

FA:  My mother’s naturalization papers.

RR:  Her mother’s naturalization papers.  And a scarf that her mother was given when she boarded the ship that took her to the United States.

FA:  [inaudible] What is that?

RR:  This is to Captain Stanley David Clayman from the Marine Corps.  That’s Frances’s son-in-law, the distinguished flying cross for heroism and extraordinary achievement in aerial flight, while serving as a pilot with Marine Medium helicopters, Squadron 165 in Vietnam on 21 February 1967.

FA:  Yeah, we went to a ceremony when he got that award.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  In addition, there’s a Cohen-Katz-Seipp Family History in Words and Pictures: 1860-1984.  Frances also has a series of clippings, one from the Jewish Advocate from Tuesday, April 27, 1950, which a picture and an article about charter members of the Parents Association of the Jewish Community Center, Brookline.  She also has a clipping from the PTA group at Devotion School and more clippings about the Jewish Center in Brookline.  And November 26, 1950, from the Sunday Herald about Brookline youngsters at a Boston Symphony concert. [RECORDING PAUSED] 1926?  What is it?  

FA:  1926.  We called it the “senior item.”  That was when we graduated from high school in 1926.  I think my picture is here.  I was very active in high school, much more so than in college.  I wore the same dress in each of these pictures.

RR:  Was that your dress-up dress?

FA:  That was my dress-up dress.  I was in the home at the time, but I had a very nice dress.  No, I wasn’t in the home.  That was the year I was – here I am,

RR:  Let’s see.  This is for the English Club, a picture of the English Club.

FA:  And I was in the French Club and the Literary Club.  It was the year I was living with a family – an au pair girl. 

RR:  But a far cry from Louise Woodward, right?

FA:  Yeah.  Oh, I loved my little charges.  I had some very nice kids.  I’m in each of these pictures.  I was in every club that they had.  But when I went to Radcliffe, I had to work outside.

RR:  So you didn’t have as much time to have as much participation.

FA:  Yeah.  If you wanted to look up Pass, P-A-S-S.

RR:  Yeah.  Let’s see.

FA:  Is it alphabetical?

RR:  Yeah.  Frances Pass.  “She’s a daisy, she’s a dandy, she’s a ripping, roaring corker.”  That’s what it says under Frances’s name.

FA:  Oh, my god.  That’s all? [laughter] Oh, here I am.  

RR:  And Frances was the secretary of her class.  

FA:  Well, I don’t know if my picture is here or not.  I can’t remember.

RR:  The Evening Shadows.  Here’s a picture.

FA:  Oh, that’s a play that they put on.  I wasn’t in that.  Okay.  I thought because of its age, I ought to show it to you.

RR:  Yeah.  That’s another thing that the exhibit committee might want.  1926.

FA:  Yeah.  Because there are other names here that –

RR:  Dorchester High School for Girls.

FA:  You mean they might have an exhibit and put all these old things in?

RR:  Oh yeah, definitely.

FA:  All right.  I’ll keep that separate then with all the things that you think they might – 

RR:  Can I see it for a second again?  

FA:  Pardon me?

RR:  I just want to look at it again. [RECORDING PAUSED] I did, and I recorded it.

FA:  Now, is this something that they might want?

RR:  Yeah, news clippings.

FA:  [inaudible] put them at the top.  

RR:  Frances is listed in the class of 1926 as “our orator.”  This is what will happen to members of the class in future life.  What is it?  The class prophecy?

FA:  Yeah, I think so.

RR:  Yeah it is.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

RR:  This is Wednesday, December 10, 1997.  I’m here to go over with Frances some objects which she is loaning to Temple Israel for the Jewish Women’s Archive exhibit starting on March 14, 1997.  One of the things that Frances is talking about also is that while she was attending Dorchester High School for Girls, whose yearbook she has and that we were looking over at our last interview, the senior item it’s called – Dorchester High School for Girls, 1926 – Frances mentioned that she worked as an au pair.  So do you want to tell a little bit more about that?

FA:  Yes.  When I left the home at the beginning of my senior year at high school, I went to live with a very lovely, warm family, Samuel Bergson, B-E-R-G-S-O-N, an attorney.  I was able to get involved with many activities at the high school even though I came to live with them in order to babysit.  It was a good year.  We spent the summer in their summer home at – I have to think.  It was just outside of Quincy.

RR:  Hull?

FA:  No.  It wasn’t Hull.  

RR:  [inaudible]

FA:  It’s a small – Hough’s Neck—H-O-U-G-H.

[Editor’s Note: No more of the tape is audible from this point forward.]

[END OF INTERVIEW]